What "look forward, not backward" really means

This, too, is a major part of Obama's legacy, in particular his "look forward, not backward" policy when it comes to prosecuting serious crimes like torture on the part of senior government officials: Dick Cheney Emerging As Key Adviser to Trump Administration The Intellectualist 12/18/2016.

John Dean used Lord Cheney as a prime example in his 2006 book, Conservative Without Conscience:

Bad judgment is Dick Cheney's trademark. It was not George Bush who came up with the idea of imposing blanket secrecy on the executive branch when he and Cheney took over. It was not George Bush who conceived of the horrible - and in some cases actually evil - policies that typify this authoritarian presidency, such as detaining "enemy combatants" with no due process and contrary to international law. It was not George Bush who had the idea of using torture during interrogations, and removing restraints on the National Security Agency from collecting intelligence on Americans. These were policies developed by Cheney and his staff, and sold to the president, and then imposed on many who subsequently objected to this authoritarian lawlessness. It was Cheney and his mentor, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq, which is proving to be a protracted calamity. Colin Powell's former top aide, Laurence Wilkinson, rather bluntly puts it: In 2002 Cheney must have believed that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorists, "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard." Colonel Wilkinson, it appears, has a rather solid take on the vice president's thinking, for there is no evidence that Cheney believed - or had any basis for such a belief - that Iraq was a spawning ground for terrorism - before we made it into one.

The issue of Dick Cheney's judgment must be raised because he is the catalyst, architect, and chief proponent of Bush's authoritarian policies. In fact, Cheney's authoritarian vice presidency has simply swallowed the president, and Cheney sought to take the office way beyond even Nixon's imperial presidency, which they had accomplished by the end of the first term. [my emphasis]

The Iraq crisis hype, remembering the Dark Lord and "the heart of evil"

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks - who was on Al Gore's Current TV network, if I haven't mentioned that lately - has a bit to say about the current war hype over Iraq, American Troops Back To Iraq - Here We Go Again 06/17/2014:

I hope that Obama has enough sense not to get involved in Iraq again. Cenk's right about the potential for escalation with inserting US troops. On the other hand, since 2001 we've been sending Special Forces to apparently every country on earth for this or that. So the announced commitment in itself doesn't sound like Obama's trying to pull a "WMD" show like in 2003.

The problem is that Obama's instinct is no so much "first do no harm" as "first, compromise on something with the Republicans." As silly as it sounds, I'm actually surprised at how blindly eager the mainstream media seems to be to hype this current situation and treat clowns like Lindsey Graham as someone that a person in their right mind would listen to about anything to do with Iraq or war.

Yes, I know, there's probably medicine I could take for that.

Cenk also takes on Dark Lord Cheney, If Only Dick Cheney Had Listened To This Iraq War Critic ... 06/17/2014:

On the live show, in a comment at the end of this segment not included in the video above, Cenk says, "The heart of evil is a dark, dark place." That may be the best description of Dick Cheney ever made. They should have included it in that video excerpt.

John Dean had some worthwhile things to say about the Dark Lord in Conservatives Without Conscience (2006):

Nixon, for all his faults, had more of a conscience than Bush and Cheney. They cannot think of a mistake the have made since coming into office, and in doing so display self-righteousness far beyond Nixon's. Bush and Cheney are Double High authoritarians, far above Nixon's league. (p. 183)

Bad judgment is Dick Cheney's trademark. (p. 160)

An examination of Cheney's career reveals that it is marked by upward mobility and downward performance. (p. 159)

[Cheney] is the catalyst, architect, and chief proponent of Bush's authoritarian policies. (p. 161)

Who could conceive of an American vice president demanding that Congress give the president the authority to torture anyone, under any circumstances? Yet that is exactly what Cheney wanted. (p. 163)

Bush and Cheney have ... insulated and isolated themselves so that when they break the law - which they have done repeatedly - they have already built their defense. To protect themselves, they have structured their White House as La Cosa Nostra might have recommended, and surround themselves with men who owe their careers to their bosses. (p. 182)

Authoritarianism is everywhere in the federal government, not because Bush and Cheney do not realize what they [are] doing, but because they are authoritarians, and they are doing what authoritarians do. In the process they have weakened the fabric of democracy, discredited the American government as never before in the eyes of the world, caused people to wonder if terrorists have a legitimate complaint, and taken the United States far from the moral high ground in refusing to abide by basic international law. (p. 176)

Tags: dick cheney, iraq war

War is over: the official end of the Iraq War

Man verweist Regenten, Staatsmänner, Völker vornehmlich an die Belehrung durch die Erfahrung der Geschichte. Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.

[One refers regents, statesmen, peoples above all to instruction through the experience of history. But what experience and history teach is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history and {never} acted according to lessons that were there to be drawn from it.] - G.F.W. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History

The Iraq War is over for the United States. I was about to say "officially" over, but I suppose that's questionable. The last pullout of combat troops is on the last day of this year. And Charlie Pierce reminds us that "the war never will truly be 'over' until the authorization to start it in the first place is expunged from the law books." (The Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War Esquire Politics Blog 12/15/2011)

The President gives his view of the war's end in President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg 12/14/2011:



The New York Times featured the Pentagon's staged goodbye ceremony in a photo spread accompanying their story: Thom Shanker, et al, In Baghdad, Panetta Leads Uneasy Moment of Closure 12/15/2011. The story does give some indication of the miserable situation that we finally declared victory and agreed to leave, since our allied Shi'a-majority government in Baghdad refused to agree to leaving the troops the Pentagon and the Obama Administration wanted under the conditions the Americans demanded:

Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

As Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta marked the occasion with a speech in a fortified concrete courtyard at the Baghdad airport, helicopters hovered above, underscoring the challenges facing a country where insurgents continue to attack American soldiers and where militants with Al Qaeda still regularly carry out devastating attacks against civilians.

The butcher's bill for Americans, according to the Times: "4,487 American lives, with 32,226 more Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics."

Two American bases are still open until December 31, and the American "troops that remain are still being attacked daily". Some US military trainers will also stay there, and undoubtedly some military and CIA black ops will continue, as well.

Despite all the hype about adapting to counterinsurgency, the US intervention bears striking resemblances from start to finish with the Vietnam War. Hype aside, the Pentagon did the same as they did in Vietnam; they stood up Iraqi armed forces built largely on the American model that are heavily dependent on US air and logistical support for optimal functioning:

Iraq’s military has critical weaknesses in a number of areas, from air defenses to basic logistical tasks like moving food and fuel and servicing the armored vehicles it is inheriting from the Americans and the jets it is buying. There are shortfalls in military engineers, artillery and intelligence.

"From a standpoint of being able to defend against an external threat, they have very limited to little capability, quite frankly," Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the departing American commander in Iraq, said in an interview after the ceremony.

President Obama observed the impending end of the Iraq War with conventional platitudes not all that different from those featured in war speeches over the last century. No Lincolnesque invocations of mystic chords of memory, much less of Lincoln's sense of humility and tragedy. Obama from the official White House transcript, Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq-Fort Bragg, North Carolina 12/14/2011:

We know too well the heavy cost of this war. More than 1.5 million Americans have served in Iraq -- 1.5 million. Over 30,000 Americans have been wounded, and those are only the wounds that show. Nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice -- including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg -- 202. So today, we pause to say a prayer for all those families who have lost their loved ones, for they are part of our broader American family. We grieve with them.

We also know that these numbers don't tell the full story of the Iraq war -– not even close. Our civilians have represented our country with skill and bravery. Our troops have served tour after tour of duty, with precious little dwell time in between. Our Guard and Reserve units stepped up with unprecedented service. You've endured dangerous foot patrols and you’ve endured the pain of seeing your friends and comrades fall. You've had to be more than soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen –- you’ve also had to be diplomats and development workers and trainers and peacemakers. Through all this, you have shown why the United States military is the finest fighting force in the history of the world. ...

As Michelle mentioned, we also know that the burden of war is borne by your families. In countless base communities like Bragg, folks have come together in the absence of a loved one. As the Mayor of Fayetteville put it, "War is not a political word here. War is where our friends and neighbors go." So there have been missed birthday parties and graduations. There are bills to pay and jobs that have to be juggled while picking up the kids. For every soldier that goes on patrol, there are the husbands and the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sons, the daughters praying that they come back.

So today, as we mark the end of the war, let us acknowledge, let us give a heartfelt round of applause for every military family that has carried that load over the last nine years. You too have the thanks of a grateful nation. (Applause.)

Part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who fought it. It’s not enough to honor you with words. Words are cheap. We must do it with deeds. You stood up for America; America needs to stand up for you.

But all the maudlin speeches in the world about our "fallen heroes" and how we "know too well the heavy cost of this war" won't bring a single one of them back. Nor will it repair the death and destruction the war brought to Iraq in the name of saving it.

We owe our "fallen heroes" and their families and every American citizen a clear understanding of how the disaster known as the Iraq War came about, including a full formal accounting of the crimes committed during it, especially the torture crimes and the blatant murders that were part of it. And, yes, there should be a full formal accounting of the war crimes committed by American soldiers and the conditions and command actions that brought them about and, all too often, ignored them or covered them up or minimized them. The Times' Michael Schmidt reports on new findings on the Haditha massacre, which the Pentagon apparently intended to (literally) commit to flames: Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq 12/14/2011:

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

In my mind, refusing to fully account for crimes like these equates rogue American soldiers who casually or carelessly murdered civilians to the actions of soldiers who did their duty and to our "fallen heroes".

No doubt, those who committed such crimes and the commanders who enabled them or covered them up would love to cover their actions with the aura of heroism and ritual worship of "fallen heroes" that our all-too-war-minded President is happy to indulge. And since Obama is deeply committed to Look Forward Not Backward - when it comes to torture, war crimes and official corruption but not to press efforts to expose criminal actions like James Risen's reporting on illegal domestic surveillance - we can't expect him to press for a serious evaluation of the "Lessons of Iraq", much less prosecution of war crimes.

Charlie Pierce argues:

On Wednesday, the president said that the Iraq War belongs to history. This, of course, is true. So, for that matter, does whatever he had for breakfast that morning. But history is not just all the stuff that happened in the past. It's why all that stuff happened in the past. It's who made all that stuff happen in the past. Until that accounting takes place, the war does not belong to history. Vietnam doesn't even fully "belong to history" yet. Our politics are still fought out over the fault lines created during that previous exercise in waste and treachery. I suspect — nay, I fear — that a great effort will be made among our political elites not to let that happen again here. Nobody will want to be "divisive." We will move forward. It will not be allowed to affect our current politics, except as a handy tool with which the war-hungry claque in our conservative foreign-policy elite can bang the president over the head a few times.

The Iraq War will "belong to history" in the sense that it will be buried there.

That will not pay all the bills. And until those bills are paid — until the proper people pay the proper recompense for what they did to this country, to that country, and to the world — the Iraq War is not over.

Speaking of maudlin, Pierce is the only writer I can think of how can pull off using the word "nay" and not have it sound maudlin. I wouldn't even try.

But what he says is very true. President Gerald Ford adopted a Look Forward Not Backward approach to the lessons of the Vietnam War, too. Obama's approach this week to the experience of the Iraq War has not been substantively different. The Vietnam War does haunt American politics, as Pierce say, as well as military strategy and popular understanding of war.

It was almost exactly 27 years between the notorious helicopter flights from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1974 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I hope Americans who remember the Iraq War will do a more thorough job of shaping a more realistic antiwar consensus over the next 27 years. Maybe someday there will be no more Dick Cheney's in the world. But none of us now living will be around to see that day. If we don't want future Cheneys to do what Dick Cheney and his collaborates did in the Iraq War and their war on the US Constitution, understanding the Iraq War thoroughly is an important safeguard against that.

The more I learn about history, the more modest my expectations become about humanity's ability to learn constructive lessons from the past. But if the human race has managed to go since 1945 without creating a world-devastating nuclear holocaust even though we had the means to do so, that in itself is reason for hope.

Tags: barack obama, dick cheney, iraq war, war crimes

The Bush Administration and the Imperial Presidency

FDL had a book salon event this past weekend to discuss The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (2010), edited by Julian Zelizer. Zelizer participated and wrote the introductory post. Speaking of himself in the third person, he summarizes his broad view of the Cheney-Bush Administration:

In the area of national security, the administration systematically expanded the power of the executive branch to deploy military forces abroad and implement related programs such as domestic surveillance, part of a deliberate drive to recreate the pre-Watergate “imperial presidency” of the Nixon era. And in electoral politics, Bush and his adviser Karl Rove adopted the goal of assembling a permanent Republican majority that would equal the strength of the New Deal coalition energized by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s—based on an unstable approach that sometimes operated through “big-tent” tactics but more often reflected ideologically divisive appeals to the conservative base.

In the book’s second chapter, Zelizer demonstrates that, despite the antigovernment rhetoric of the conservative movement, the expansion and centralization of power in the executive branch is a major legacy of conservative governance from Nixon and Reagan through Bush. Key policymakers in the Bush administration, including Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, worked to restore presidential prerogatives that the Democratic Congress had weakened in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. During the 1970s, Congress sought to restrict the autonomy of the White House through reforms such as the War Powers Act, the Church Committee’s exposure of the CIA’s extralegal activities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (requiring warrants for domestic wiretaps), and the independent counsel statute. [my emphasis]

And he notes the authoritarian trend in Republican Party conservatism: "'The war on terrorism,' Zelizer concludes, 'has highlighted the reality that presidential power is integral, rather than aberrational, to modern conservatism.'" (my emphasis)

Tags: bush administration, dick cheney, george w bush

Ron Reagan, Jr., on Dick Cheney and the Cheney-Bush torture policy

Tags: accountability for torture, dick cheney, torture

How bad can our "quality" press get?

The torture issue has shown the train wreck our Establishment press has become, even the most "quality" segments of it. More so than the Iraq War, more than the Whitewater fiasco, more than the Monica Lewinsky obsession, more than the press War Against Gore in 1999-2000, more than the Florida election scandal in 2000.

The wreckage of our "quality" press was on full display on the PBS Newshour for Thursday, May 21, in their discussion on the torture and Bush Gulag issues: Obama, Cheney Speeches Reframe Debate on Security Policy.

They were discussing Barack Obama's speech on the torture program, the closing of the Guantánamo gulag station, and his plans for a new kangaroo court system to replace the one that was a total failure under the Cheney-Bush administration. The Newshour reported Obama's speech first, but they basically gave Dark Lord Dick Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) defending torture equal billing. That gave the press their hook to treat it, as they've done all year, as a process story of competing political points of view.

And that's how this sad bunch discussed it. Here was infotainer Judy Woodruff's first two questions to her panel:

Richard Norton Smith, to you first. I don't remember anything like this. How unusual is it to have a just-stepped-down vice president challenging a president to have dueling speeches like this?

Well, Steve Coll, what we've figured out today -- or went back and looked at -- is that the vice president's speech was scheduled first and it was only a few days after that the president scheduled his speech. I mean, it's almost as if the White House thought it might benefit from a contrast.

Process, staging, theater criticism. Our sad excuse for a press corps love those things. Even in this discussion that involved discussed trials and prisons, none of the five people on camera gave any sense that they understood that the torture crimes are an extremely serious legal issue, an issue that goes right to the heart of the rule of law itself.

As that second question just quoted says, one of the guests was Steve Coll, now president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a group (though Woodruff couldn't be bothered to mention this) that is very close to the Obama administration right now, so Coll's statements could be taken as some indication of the ways in which the administration is approaching this issue.

Another of the Abu Ghuraib photos that were scheduled for release May 28 that Obama and the Pentagon decided we shouldn't see: Are they trying to protect the soldiers? Or the hands-on torturers, the doctors and psychologists who assisted them, the lawyers who wrote alibi opinions, the policymakers and generals who ordered these tortures?
Correction 05/30/09: This photo had been previously published by Salon on 03/26/2006

Perhaps the second most painful part of that segment was listening to alleged liberal columnist Ruth Marcus deliver the High Broderist message of the glories of Centrism. That's why the failure of the Establishment press and the politicians of both parties to put the legal issues front-and-center on the torture crimes is so problematic. Because the "centrism" that celebrity infotainers like Marcus worship in the current torture "debate", as the press insists on calling it because of their process focus, the "centrist" position means not enforcing the law against the torture perpetrators.

I really don't care on this issue whether the law-and-order position is considered "left" or "right" by the airheads among our star pundits. The laws against torture need to be enforced. And that means prosecuting all those legally culpable in the torture program that the Cheney-Bush administration ran.

The White House Web site has what is apparently the actual text of his speech as delivered: Remarks by the President on National Security 05/21/09. The one thing I know of that the Bush administration did better than Obama's so far is that it was easier to find the text of Presidential speeches on the White House Web site in the bad old days of the Bush administration.

The (prepared) text of the Dark Lord's shameless defense of torture at AEI can be found at the AEI Web site: Remarks by Richard B. Cheney 05/21/09.

Tags: accountability for torture, barack obama, dick cheney, torture

Painful Hitler analogies

I've highlighted Jeffrey's Record's plea to bury the "Munich analogy" in our foreign policy discussions more than once (10/06/09 and 01/02/07.

I'd also like to bury the superficial analogies to the Weimar Republic. Like this one: The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment by Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org 03/15/09.

Democracy in America has some serious threats, such as the "Unitary Executive" precedent set by the Cheney-Bush administration with its rampant lawlessness, and a national press that no longer seems able to provide the kind of news on public affairs that a democracy has to have to survive. While the first is more dramatic, I'm not at all sure that the second isn't a worse problem.

But neither of those problems can be understood with half-baked analogies to pre-Nazi Germany. Nor can any other problems that I can think of, except maybe temporary relief of boredom. Freeman is probably trying to be melodramatic when he writes, "The Republican propensity for fascism must not be underestimated." But it sounds so trite it just makes me want to groan. For most Americans, "fascism" means something like "bad stuff" and is associated with the Other Side in the "Good War", the Second World War.

Even people who have a good idea what it means have trouble actually defining it. Which is why I basically try to avoid using the word in describing present day political events and movements.

Jeffrey Record argues that making every significant foreign challenge into a "Munich" showdown and therefore a test of the testosterone charge of the decision-makers (he puts it a bit more formally), and making every foreign adversary into the new "Hitler", policymakers have indulged in major threat inflation on more than one occasion. Making American domestic politics into a showdown with "fascism" and "Hitler" is also a form of threat inflation.

Dealing with the legacy of Dick Cheney is problem enough. The real need is not to conjure up even greater threats in our imaginations but to take the concrete steps of legal accountability and transparency that are required to deal with that problem. That one is more than enough to worry about.

Tags: dick cheney, germany

Why the Obama Justice Department has to prosecute the torture perpetrators

How many Americans thought in 2008 2000 that today we would seriously be debating whether it was a good thing or not to prosecute American officials who directly engaged in torture and in conspiracy to evade the laws against torture?

Human rights attorney Scott Horton lays out in the case of the torture policy why no honest Justice Department can ignore the criminal acts involved in that national disgrace. The Cheney-Bush Justice Department is not honest. It has acted as a major part of the series of crimes involved. As Horton notes in the post from which this excerpt comes, Known Unknowns TPM Cafe 11/25/08, He is a former law partner of the current Attorney General, Michael Mukasey:

When all the facts are on the table (and I have been researching them for four years now, which is why I am certain that Mukasey's characterizations won't hold water), we will learn that the decision to introduce torture was taken first, and the DOJ lawyers were asked to issue memoranda to provide cover for the decisions taken. Some of it happened in a shockingly casual form over a squash court, as Rumsfeld's lawyer told a DOJ lawyer about some of the techniques used and asked him to provide cover in some written memo. When DOJ lawyers attempted any measure of serious analysis (as happened with Dan Levin, for instance), they were fired, or quickly learned that to protect their own reputation they would have to leave the Department soon. When DOJ lawyers talked with lawyers with actual expertise in the area--at the Department of Defense and State--they were told repeatedly that the proposal was a criminal act. One general, one of the Pentagon's most senior lawyers, recounted to me a meeting with John Yoo in which Yoo described to him the OLC memo on torture. "Your opinion is both incorrect and incompetent" he told him. To this Yoo responded that he wasn't concerned, why he had even gotten the head of the Criminal Division to sign off on it. The general told me this was the point at which he began suspecting that a criminal conspiracy was afoot inside the Justice Department to violate the Anti-Torture and War Crimes Acts. Indeed, I soon learned, that view was widespread within the government, even inside of the Justice Department. [my emphasis]

If an Obama Justice Department sweeps things like this under the rug, for whatever reason, that won't just be a terrible policy decision. It would be outright dereliction of duty.

This is very serious stuff, with the most serious of long-term implications. A decision not to prosecute those acts is not a serious option for any administration committed to the rule of law.

Horton proposes an investigative commission with full subpoena power to investigate the torture crimes in particular, an approach that would not preclude subsequent prosecutions. He's a genuine expert in this area, and I assume he has good reasons for proposing such a sequence for proceedings.

But I'm not convinced. I don't see what fact-finding a "Truth Commission" could do that a full-blown prosecutorial investigation couldn't do better. And it seems that the latter would get to the necessary result quicker. Even though Horton's description of the problem sounds to me like an argument that straight-up prosecutions are absolutely necessary, he seems to be more interested in the Truth Commission part. But he's right in defining the stakes:

Under President Bush, the Constitution took a shellacking. We had the most devious, secretive government in our nation's history. In the end, it was at war with the rule of law itself. But this isn't the time to be talking about indictments and prosecutions [!?!?], though that may come in the fullness of time. Now is the time to force those dark secrets from the recesses in which they've been hidden and insure that the public fully understands what was done by the most incompetent, corrupt and lawless government we've ever had. Charting those dealings is the first step. Correcting them is the second. [my emphasis]

Being as much of a history junkie as a political junkie, I appreciate the need to understand, factually and historically, what went on.

But from the standpoint of restoring the rule of law, that's not good enough. Plus, "the fullness of time" sounds dreadfully like "all deliberate speed".

Here's a case where if we're careful in how we look, we can learn something from the experiences of countries like Spain, Chile, Argentina and eastern European countries that have had relatively recent transitions from dictatorships (of various degrees of severity) to liberal democracies.

What Cheney and Bush did with the torture policy as well as other things was to operate outside the law and the Constitution without formally setting aside the Constitutional structure. And for most people in most areas of life, they didn't experience a radical change in the way the laws worked. Cops didn't stop giving traffic tickets, which is the main kind of hostile encounter most people have with law enforcement. But the illegal actions of this administration were still very serious, with long-term consequences for the whole country.

That makes the transition to a presumably law-abiding Presidential administration different from what a country like Argentina experienced in 1983 when they went from a military junta ruling to having a competitive, multi-party democracy again beginning in 1983. In that case, a regime that ruled openly by force and arbitrary actions, complete with death squads used against thousands of Argentine citizens, was replaced by a civilian government committed to the rule of law.

It was clear in that case that the junta stepping down and being replaced by a democracy meant that things had changed in a permanent way. And the public was broadly in a "never again" mood after their experiences with the junta of 1976-83. So there was an argument to be made that they could safely go forward with the rule of law without going back to prosecute the bloody acts of the junta.

That's not what they actually did. The military had set up an indemnity for itself before stepping down from power. But the civilian government rescinded the indemnity and put leaders of the junta on trial in 1985, as well as leaders of a couple of the violent guerrilla groups that were the ostensible reason for the junta taking power. I suppose in the context that was a kind of "bipartisanship".

There's not a direct analogy, although the general theme of accountability and deterrence of future such acts is common to the two situations. It's actually the contrast in the two situations that I take as the bigger lesson.

It's precisely because the Cheney-Bush administration broke the law extensively while preserving the basic governmental structure that makes prosecutions even more necessary in our present case. What's the point in having a rule of law if the Executive can arbitrarily set it aside? And what's the deterrence for the next set of Cheneys and Roves if there are no legal consequences for the criminal acts of the current administration?

Cheney and Bush created a real-life template for who an American government can use an authoritarian political party to establish a truly lawless Presidential government. The next set of Roves and Cheneys that come to power need to think that if they are ordered to implement similar lawless actions, that the law may very well catch up to them.

If the guilty participants in this administration don't experience direct legal consequences, i.e., prosecution and legal punishment, for what they did, then the Cheney authoritarian model has worked. Next time around, it's just a matter of finding the right combination of voter suppression, fear, de facto control of the media and suppression of real dissent to make it permanent.

Cheney's idea of democracy was articulated back in 1949 by East German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht, as he explained to his Party comrades in 1949 what kind of government they were founding in the new "German Democratic Republic": "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)

Not prosecuting known major crimes from this administration would validate the Cheney-Ulbricht approach to governance. And that would definitely not be a good thing.

Tags: bush administration, dick cheney, torture

Grim reckoning

Robert Fisk wrote last week in The Independent on the topic of how Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush's delusions 11/08/08.

Fisk, who not only knows a lot about Middle Eastern politics and wars but also has a practical sense of history, especially for that region in its relations to the US and Europe, writes:

Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He's got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what – internationally – he will have to do if the "change" he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America's borders. He will have to re-think – and deconstruct – the whole "war on terror". He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America's massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan – why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? – and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush's 2004 acceptance of Israel's claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials – and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan – and Syria. [my emphasis]

But this is something that I had not heard before, although I knew that there was serious discipline problems in the US forces in Iraq. Coming from Fisk, I take it seriously:

Indeed, there's a growing concern among America's allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control – indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus' original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the "surge" than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission – and morals – had become so warped by Bush's policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was – if not a rogue operation – certainly not sanctioned by Washington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad. [my emphasis]

A military act of aggression against a country with which we are not at war may have been a rogue operation?

This is one of the scarier things I've heard in a while.

It's probably time - actually, long past time - for Americans to get used to the German principle that there is no such thing as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. Fisk frames the torture policy and the Bush Gulag in a way that reminds us just how serious the damage done to our country by Dick Cheney and George Bush has been:

There is just one little problem, though, and that's the "missing" prisoners. Not the victims who have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.

And if some of the more serious crimes connected with the torture policy, the Bush Gulag and Iraq War are not actually prosecuted and the perpetrators held legally responsible, it's very likely that the rule of law will be seriously impaired on a long-term basis.

The Democrats are wringing their hands over whether to boot Joe Lieberman out of his Chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, an action which should be a no-brainer. While they have a far more serious and difficult task of restoring the rule of law after the Cheney-Bush administration.

The crimes committed during this outgoing administration - and not just those involved with foreign policy - have long-term consequences. If the incoming Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress don't treat them for what they are - crimes, and serious ones - America's reputation among both allies and adversaries as a rogue superpower will endure for a very long time.

This is not just a matter of some vague moral sense of "dealing with the past." There are many aspiring Dick Cheneys out there who would like to resume the Cheney brand of government, and take it to the next level. And I don't even like to think what that next level would look like. If the criminal acts of the current administration aren't dealt with as criminal acts, it's very likely that some the aspiring Cheneys will succeed in their goal.

Tags: authoritarianism, dick cheney, robert fisk, torture, war crimes

The Dark Lord of the Bush Presidency

David Bromwich in The Co-President at Work New York Review of Books 10/22/08 (11/20/08 issue) gives us a good reminder of how this country has been ruled for the last eight years under the Cheney-Bush administration. This is a telling story about Cheney's methods of operation, in this case around his own selection as Vice President:

As early as March 2000, Bush asked him whether he would consider taking the second slot. Cheney at first said no. Later, he agreed to serve as Bush's inspector of the qualifications of others; his lieutenants were David Addington and his daughter Liz. Some way into that work, Bush asked Cheney again, and this time he said yes. The understanding was concluded before any of the lesser candidates were interviewed. It was perhaps the first public deception that they worked at together: a lie of omission - and a trespass against probity - to give an air of legitimacy to the search for a nominee. But their concurrence in the stratagem, and the way each saw the other hold to its terms, signaled an equality in manipulation as no formal contract could have done. It is hardly likely that an exchange of words was necessary.

The vice-presidential search in the spring of 2000 was characteristic of the co-presidency to come in one other way. It involved the collection of information for future use against political rivals. In this case, the rivals were the other potential VPs, among them Lamar Alexander, Chuck Hagel, and Frank Keating. They had been asked to submit exhaustive data concerning friends, enemies, sexual partners, psychological vicissitudes (noting all visits to therapists of any kind), personal embarrassments, and sources of possible slander, plus a complete medical history. Each also signed a notarized letter that gave Cheney the power to request records from doctors without further clearance.

All this information would prove useful in later years. Barton Gellman reveals in Angler that soon after Frank Keating was mentioned as a likely candidate for attorney general, a story appeared in Newsweek about an awkward secret in his past: an eccentric patron had paid for his children's college education. No law had been broken, and nothing wrongly concealed; but the story killed a chance for Keating to be named attorney general; and the leak could only have come from one person. Doubtless most of the secrets in Cheney's possession were the more effective for not being used. [my emphasis]

Along that same line, Bromwich notes, "When he ran for Congress in 1978, and won election for the first of five terms, he got himself quickly appointed to an odd combination of committees: Ethics and Intelligence. They had in common the access they offered to secrets of entirely different kinds."

Bromwich does not refer to the 2006 book by Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. But they described that same process of how Cheney manipulated the Vice Presidential nominating process in their book, which was published before those formally included in his review.

Referring to the web of think-tanks and policy groups and personal relationships that Sidney Blumenthal described back in 1986 in The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Bromwich observes, "Republicans, since 1975, have had a foreign policy establishment that stays in place even when they are out of power."

That's true for domestic policy, as well. And that's not likely to change during an Obama administration. The Democrats have built up more of a "civil society" infrastructure during the last eight years. But what Bromwich writes is still largely true, that "Democrats can claim nothing of the sort". Certainly not on the scale that institutions like the American Enterprise Institute have exercised influence.

And Bromwich is also correct in saying, "Through the continuity of neoconservative advisers, the military-statist wing of the Republican Party has thus, for three decades now, had the consistency and coherence of a shadow government." There's nothing inherently wrong or necessarily destructive about such a thing. On the contrary, parliamentary systems can and do have have more-or-less formal shadow cabinets, in which a member of the main opposition party assumes the role of primary spokesperson on parallel lines to the responsibilities of the Cabinet Ministers. But the neocons and their nationalist/unilateralist allies like Cheney and Don Rumsfeld did have destructive goals in mind. And still do.

I'm not quite ready to adopt Bromwich's formulation in the following. But it is a potentially very useful framework for understanding the foreign-policy neocons, in particular:

Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006. [my emphasis]

Of course, I cried a river over poor Rummy's fall. (NOT!)

One reservation I have about this approach, though, is that it could be taken to imply that the genuinely militaristic ideas of the neocons are more distinct from the Republican Party as such than they really are. The Christian Right activists generally don't consider themselves neoconservatives. But they are the most enthusiastic popular base for the Cheney-Bush foreign policy.

There are those critics of this administration who think Cheney's role is exaggerated by critics arguing along the lines of Bromwich. And we certainly should give Bush a pass on his responsibility for the things he's done even if Cheney masterminded them. But I also have the impression that Cheney has been the most important moving force in this administration, particularly on foreign policy but also on much of domestic policy, like the critical area of energy.

Josh Marshall deserves credit for describing what an outsized role Cheney played in this administration earlier than most in his article Vice Grip Washington Monthly Jan/Feb 2003. And he pointed out how Cheney's influence was especially associated with bad results:

Indeed, on almost any issue, it's usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser.

Yet somehow, in Washington's collective mind, Cheney's numerous stumbles and missteps have not displaced the reputation he enjoys as a sober, reliable, skilled inside player. .... If there were any justice or logic in this administration as to who should or shouldn't keep their job, there'd be another high-ranking official in line for one of those awkward conversations: Dick Cheney.

And his concluding analysis in that article has been sustained by events in the subsequent years:

Why, though, has the press failed to grasp Cheney's ineptitude? The answer seems to lie in the power of political assumptions. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn famously observed that scientific theories or "paradigms"--Newtonian physics, for instance--could accommodate vast amounts of contradictory evidence while still maintaining a grip on intelligent people's minds. Such theories tend to give way not incrementally, as new and conflicting data slowly accumulates, but in sudden crashes, when a better theory comes along that explains the anomalous facts. Washington conventional wisdom works in a similar way. It doesn't take long for a given politician to get pegged with his or her own brief story line. And those facts and stories that get attention tend to be those that conform to the established narrative. In much the same way, Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration--the CEO to Bush's chairman--is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see. [my emphasis]

Tags: cheney, dick cheney

All you need to know about the Presidential campaign

The Dark Lord endorses his candidate:



Tags: cheney, dick cheney

That strike into Syria

I already "fisked" this article, This article today, Officials Say U.S. Killed an Iraqi in Raid in Syria by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker New York Times 10/27/08, at some length in another, "long-form" post. But I wanted to return to it to summarize some of the most important points.

One is that the administration is all-but-officially admitting they made a military strike into Syrian territory. This was not a "covert action". It was a full-on military strike, a "targeted assassination" operation aimed at a particular individual, if the anonymous sources are to be believed. Do I need to add that there's no clear reason why these sources should have been granted anonymity since the story couldn't sound more like an officially-sanctioned "leak"? Or it could be some kind of "trial balloon" to test public and Congressional reaction.


Targeted assassination in general is a highly dubious policy with a highly dubious legal status. This one clearly includes some very real immediate practical risks: reduction of Syrian cooperation with US anti-terrorism operations (which could be a lucky break for Syrian nationals selected for the CIA's "special rendition"); a relaxing of border controls on the Syrian side; retaliation by Syrian against Iraqi refugees currently residing there; interference with Israeli diplomacy aimed at improving their relations with Syria.

I'm not an attorney or a specialist in international law. But I know enough about it that I would be amazed if it weren't a straight-up illegal act of aggression. And it's very notable that the anonymous administration officials are pitching this one not just as an application of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war but an expansion of it.

Motives? The administration officials could be telling the truth. (Hey, it's theoretically possible!) There clearly seems to be an idea of locking the Obama administration into these kinds of strikes, if not into expanded wars in Pakistan, Syria and/or Iran. The anonymous official included an explicit hint that the same thing might happen to Iran, where there have already been covert actions, according to Seymour Hersh's reporting. There was even a passage that could be read as a suggestion that the assassination target may have been killed after he was taken into custody.

I'm also worried that one purpose, maybe even the main purpose, is to establish precedents for the next Republican administration to provide some kind of thin validation for further illegal acts. This is why it's so important that there be official, criminal investigations of this current administration's bad acts. Because if Obama decides to give them all a pass, the Cheneyized Republican Party will take that as a green light to go back to the use of a lawless "Unitary Executive" the next time they come to power.

This strike into Syria could be a much bigger deal than it might appear on the surface.

Tags: authoritarianism, cheney, dick cheney, syria, unilateral executive, unitary executive

Speaking of conspiracy theories...

No, I didn't get this from browsing Paranoia magazine in the grocery story. But if the bad deeds and actual conspiracies in this administration that we already know about and are well-documented aren't enough for you to worry about, there's always the possibility of Cheney pulling an "October surprise" to put Maverick McCain over the hump in November's Presidential election.

Like this, from Target: Bin Laden Los Angeles Times 04/13/08:

... Bin Laden may well understand what many Americans do not: that he is more likely to be killed or captured during the next year or so than at any time since late 2001, when he escaped U.S. warplanes bombing him in eastern Afghanistan, at Tora Bora. ...

The structure of this U.S.-aid pipeline [to Pakistan], set against the decades-long history of on-again, off-again American support for Pakistan, encouraged Pakistan's top military commanders to believe that if Bin Laden were ever captured or killed, the U.S. might reduce its support or even go home. A fugitive Bin Laden became their meal ticket.

Now these incentives have been at least partly reversed.

I'm just saying.

Tags: al qaida, dick cheney

How useless are the "moderate" Republicans, Chap. 57

George Packer reports in The Fall of Conservatism The New Yorker 05/26/08 (accessed 05/25/08):

The phrase that signalled Bush’s approach [in the 2000 campaign] was "compassionate conservatism," but it never amounted to a policy program. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount, Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee’s new book, "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President" (Thomas Dunne), the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: "We would seek confrontation on every front. ... The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us." Cheney’s combative instincts and belief in an unfettered and secretive executive proved far more influential at the White House than Bush's campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider." Cheney behaved as if, notwithstanding the loss of the popular vote, conservative Republican domination could continue by sheer force of will. On domestic policy, the Administration made tax cuts and privatization its highest priority; and its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy. (my emphasis)

This might have had some constructive practical effect if this had become public, say, around the time it happened. But, so far as I'm aware, this is the first we've heard of that particular statement of Cheney's before he even took office, from "moderate" Republican Lincoln Chafee or any of the rest.

Tags: dick cheney, republican party, republicans

The Dems have won another one, y'all

The newest Democratic Congressman, Travis Childers of Mississippi: Dark Lord Cheney will be unhappy

This one was the special election in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which has been Republican, won in a landslide by Democrat Travis Childers! The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports in Democrat wins congressional race by Natalie Chandler 05/14/08:

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Childers had 57,276 votes to Davis' 49,314, based on unofficial returns. [Childers 54%, Davis 46%]

The counties in which Childers led [Republican candidate Greg] Davis include Alcorn, Benton, Lee, Tippah, Prentiss, Yalobusha and Choctaw. Davis had a commanding lead over Childers in DeSoto County. Tate also is among the counties he carried.

Childers' victory "changes the dynamics going into the fall elections," said his campaign press secretary, Terry Cassreino, who also is spokesman for the Mississippi Democratic Party. "Democrats weren't supposed to win this seat."

Voter turnout was mixed in the district that also includes Oxford, Booneville, Tupelo and Columbus, but it was higher than projected in DeSoto County, a Republican stronghold where Davis lives. Circuit Clerk Dale Thompson credited the turnout to local, bipartisan efforts to energize voters.

This is a good reminder of why the Dems need to be seriously contesting every Senate and Congressional race in "red" states like Mississippi. Because not everyone is "red" there. At the very least, it forces the Republicans to spend money there rather than elsewhere. And it builds the party for moments like this.

And an added sweetner: "GOP Vice President Dick Cheney visited the county Monday in support of Davis." Good on Natalie Chandler for that construction: "GOP Vice President".

Tags: dick cheney, travis childers

How badly will the Cheney era end?

Steve Clemons warns about Cheney's Compulsive Obsession with Iraq WMDs & Syrian Nukes Washington Notes blog 04/24/08:

Even after all of this time and President Bush's own abandonment of the WMD theme, Vice President Richard Cheney is still convinced that there are hidden WMDs in the Middle East that bear Saddam Hussein's product mark. A source reported to me yesterday that in the last two weeks, Cheney held forth at a meeting on Iraq WMDs and insisted that they were real and still out there.

Cheney believes that Syria has them - and has been watching closely intelligence streams from a secret "black SIGINT base" that the US has placed in the mountains near the intersection of the Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi borders.

Cheney's minions are pushing Congress to sponge up Israeli intelligence assessments about purported Syria-North Korea cooperation on a now destroyed, alleged nuclear site. There are many who doubt Israel's assessments in the U.S. intelligence community. A consensus has built that North Korea and Syria were cooperating on some machine tool operation to retrofit increasingly sophisticated short range missiles with new capacity, perhaps air burst capacity that could potentially deliver biological or chemical agents.

Tags: dick cheney

Wars in Iraq and Vietnam (5): the more-imperial-than-ever-Presidency

This installment of my posts on the book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007), Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., is about the essay by Andrew Bacevich, "Gulliver at Bay: The Paradox of the Imperial Presidency."

Bacevich is very good at seeing complex and contradictory dynamics at work in institutions. In discussing the power of the Presidency, he reviews the history that is largely familiar to those who have paid some attention to the subject of how the Presidency has acquired a very much disproportionate role in foreign and military policy than that envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution. And also disporporationate to what had been actual practice up until basically the time of the Second World War.

The comparison he makes between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War here is on Presidential power, and most of his discussion focuses on the Cheney-Bush administration. Lyndon Johnson's deceptive use of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gain an open-ended authorization to use force in Southeast Asia was part of the abuse of power that has often been seen in the imperial Presidency.

But, as Bacevich writes, the Joint Congressional Resolution of 09/14/01 which gave a far broader mandate to the President to use force "against those nations, organizations, or persons" involved in the 9/11 attacks and also directed the President "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." Bacevich observes, "The notorious Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 was a straitjacket compared to this spacious grant of authority."

He doesn't make an argument that the 2001 resolution somehow authorized the Iraq War, which would not be accurate. His point was that Congress in practice became even more passive in relation to the Executive than it had even in its less commendable moments in the past. Even later, after the stunning incompetence of the Cheney-Bush administration had become clear and various acts of illegality like the torture program became known, "the White House had little difficulty fending off legislative meddling."

After the 2006 election, the White House has had more difficulty fending off such Congressional interventions. But it has still been largely successful in doing so. Joe Conason has just provided us an example and explanation of one aspect of Congressional weakness in Obama's European problem Salon 12/29/07.

Bacevich regards the rapid seizure of additional Presidential power after the 9/11 attacks as "in essence a rolling coup." From a less serious historian than Bacevich, this might be dismissed as hyperbole. But he describes in more detail what he means. And the short version is: Dick Cheney.

He expands on what he means by a "rolling coup" by describing the process in which Cheney, Rummy and their various allies set out to override institutional barriers within the Executive branch. Although he doesn't go into it in this essay, Cheney also played a key role in gutting the balancing power of Congress by asserting direct leadership over the Republican caucus in Congress to an unprecedented degree. Bacevich even describes the process as a "military coup", but he uses the term to make a particular point:

This was not true in the sense that the intent was to empower the officer corps - quite the contrary - but rather in the sense that the coup leaders [Cheney, Rummy, Paul Wolfowitz, et al] all subscribed to the conviction that armed might held the key both to advancing U.S. global ambitions and to investing supreme power in the president/commander in chief. Indeed, to persuade Americans to see this president's principal identity or function as being commander in chief was to remove encumbrances on his power (and by extension on their own power).

The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse to declare their famous Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Cheney, Bush, Rummy and their allies "seized upon that opportunity with alcrity. These men did not fear a 'Global War on Terror.' They welcomed it, certain of their ability to bend war to their purposes."

Cheney and his crew, Bacevich writes, saw two principle enemies in the GWOT. One was the various unfriendly regimes in the Middle East, first of all Iraq. Here their approach was the neocon/Trotskyist idea of wars of liberation to install friendly regime, foolishly believing it was be easy.

Their second set of opponents, as they saw it, were various obstacles at home. Rummy even said at one point, "the adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." But not only consolidating the power of the Executive Branch but creating alternative channels to bypass institutional restraints like the vetting of intelligence by professional analysts, they eventuall swept that obstacle aside. Congress, sadly, was less of a problem to sideline.

Bacevich focuses on an aspect of the current administration whose results in the future are perhaps more unpredictable than most. For all their contempt for democracy, part of what Cheney and Rummy had to do to achieve their power goals was to establish a more firm civilian control over the military. It's not as though the generals were in a state of rebellion against civilian control. They weren't. But for a variety of reasons, some having to do with the personnel involved and (more importantly) broader institutional processes, Rummy and Wolfowitz perceived that during the Clinton administration "the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gotten too bigh for their britches. Civil control of the military had grown tenuous [in their view]. The new secretary of defense and his deputy took office intent on putting the generals in their place."

Civilian control of the military in itself is a good thing. And one challenge that the Clinton administration faced was that something like 90% of the officer corps was Republican. And, as Bacevich himself has described in his book The New American Militarism (???), the Christian Right has long regarded the officer corps as a mission field and Christianist influence among military officers has increased significantly over the past two decades.

Rummy's reassertion of civilian authority was ham-handed in many ways. And it certainly didn't guarantee that only good policies would be produced. But it did re-emphasize the importance of civilian control over the military. And it has shown the military vividly that the Republican Party previously favored by their officers can do a lot of damage with foolish, misguided and reckless policies. There is substantial evidence of increasing Democratic sympathies within the military and military families. Hopefully, this will facilitate the job of a new Democratic administration.

But, for all the increased concentration of power in the Executive Branch during this administration, it hasn't meant that Cheney and Bush could impose their will on the Middle East by force. Not even on Iraq. Bacevich concludes his essay with these two paragraphs, in which he asks what Bush can do to get the US out of Iraq:

Remarkably little, it turns out. Apart from incessant jawboning - promising success just around the corner, touting the latest "turning point," and warning against the dangers of insurgent "isolationism" should popular support for the war flag—the Most Powerful Man in the World has demonstrated an inability either to win the Iraq War or to extricate the United States from Iraq in a timely way. Having chosen after 9/11 to fight his Global War on Terror without mobilizing the country - neither increasing the size of the armed forces nor changing U.S. domestic priorities — he finds himself unable today to raise the additional resources that "victory" would require. He has yet to identify the "second front" that will seize the initiative from the enemy. He has yet to devise the Manhattan Project that will deliver decisive results. He has yet to form the Grand Alliance that will rally the world in support of the cause. In terms of shaping the course of the Iraq War, the photographer who recorded the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib has wielded greater influence than has President Bush.

By the summer of 2006, political observers were transfixed by the slow but steady decline in the president's approval rating as measured by the opinion polls, as if the number reported actually meant anything. What mattered was not that George W. Bush had become the least popular president since Richard Nixon or Harry Truman. What mattered was that neither he, nor his administration, nor the vast apparatus of the federal government could do anything to get the nation out of its fix. Here lay the ultimate expression of what the rolling coup of 2001-2003 had wrought.

The current Republican Party line, of course, is that our Savior-General Petraeus has fixed everything. But that's as phony as the previous Party lines about our unending victories in the Iraq War. What Bacevich wrote as of the summer of 2006 still holds true at the end of 2007.

Tags: andrew bacevich, authoritarianism, bush administration, dick cheney, iraq war

Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush

Craig Unger's new book on the Bush dynasty could probably be more accurately titled, The Iraq War and the Twilight on the Bush II Presidency. It's largely an account of how the influence of the neoconservatives and the Christian Right converged in the Republican Party to produce the Iraq War after the 9/11 attacks, using the latter as a justification for a far-reaching, radical foreign policy.

Unger has done his own extensive interviews with many of the key players in his story, as well as using the many available secondary sources to construct his narrative. He does a good job of telling the story, including the disgraceful role of the Establishment press, although he does seem a bit too wedded to conventional political wisdom on some points. He also gives credit to the liberal blogosphere for keeping questions and issues in play that the mainstream press was ignoring or underplaying, like the serious questions about the necons' claims about the now-infamous aluminum tubes.

These contemporary histories are important because they preserve a lot of current perspectives, including their limitations, in a way that will become a challenge to reconstruct some day. Especially since the Iraq War is such an historic disaster and everyone is already trying to distance themselves from the many failures involved. We can see already in Unger's account that the material that has so far leaked through Dick Cheney's thick wall of official secrecy makes the story of the Iraq War look much uglier than it did as it was unfolding. And to those who were really paying attention, it looked very ugly at the time.

Unger's narrative gives a good idea of the various factors that went into the Iraq War: neoconservative grand strategies of forcibly remaking Middle Eastern nations to be more congenial to the West and to Israel; access to oil supplies; the scams run by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi emigrants; the lobbying efforts for Likud Party-oriented pro-Israel groups, especially AIPAC; and, Christianist notions about bringing on the end of the world and the return of Christ by escalating tensions in the Middle East. More subjectively, there were psychological factors including Bush's desire to outshine his father as a military conqueror; neocon group dynamics that led to shared assumptions not being adequately questioned; and, Dick Cheney's authoritarianism.

It would be inaccurate to reduce a political event as important as the Iraq War to psychological causes. But I was particularly intrigued by Unger's description of neocon group dynamics, which he describes as reaching a cultlike intensity. Because of their shared friendships and interlocking front groups (Unger uses the term), they created a kind of extended groupthink in which the fantastic and foolish notion was validated and revalidated that conquering Iraq and installing a subservient government would be quick and easy, and this would set the stage for a rapid series of regime changes in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Unger at one point seems to be saying that it was the grand neocon strategy of serial regime change that was the real reason for the Iraq War. But I don't think its meaningful to exclude those other factors. The role of oil has never given me the kind of contortions that it seem to induce in some people. It's pretty obvious to me that all American policies in the Middle East need to take oil supplies into account. It would be irresponsible not to do so. The fact that some oil companies may have colluded with Cheney to arrange oil deals for themselves is something that deserves detailed official investigation than it has so far received. But even if there are some players who turn out to be stereotypical cynical manipulators concerned only with oil riches, that doesn't eliminate the other factors as important.

Unger gives a good blow-by-blow description of how the measures the neocons and Cheney's office set up to "stovepipe" raw intelligence to policymakers while bypassing the elaborate vetting process of the official intelligence agencies. This process meant that the various neocons in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President could cherry-pick data bits which fit their own narrow and unrealistic preconceptions and ignore others. No President should simply set policy based on intelligence recommendations. It's the President's job to make decisions based on a wide variety of considerations. But the "stovepiping" process is a real reminder how important it is to have raw intelligence information carefully vetted by people who are looking for factual information more than for bits of useful propaganda.

In dealing with present-day issues of transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation, having accurate intelligence is especially important. The recklessness and destructiveness of Cheney and Bush in this regard is staggering, just based on what we already know. I shudder to think what the picture will look like when considerably more key information becomes public.

Unger also does a good job of highlighting the dubious role of longtime neocon player Michael Ledeen, another of the Iran-Contra veterans who have played destructive roles during this administration. Unger also weaves the story of the Joe Wilson mission to Niger and the subsequent Valerie Plame exposure into his narrative, which is one of the key things that reminds us how much uglier the story looks with the then-behind-the-scenes material included.

The particular idiocy and recklessness of neocon bigwig Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle also comes out clearly in Unger's narrative. For instance, Perle wrote an editorial that appeared in USA Today on 05/01/03, the same day as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" extravaganza on the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was entitled Relax, Celebrate Victory. The great strategic thinker wrote of the Iraq War, "From start to finish, President Bush has led the United States and its coalition partners to the most important military victory since World War II." To repeat, this was May of 2003.

Unger gives what's probably my favorite Perle quote, too, from just before the start of the Iraq War: "If we just let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now." (my emphasis) What.A.Fool.

But let's give the Prince of Darkness credit. People are already singing songs about the Iraq War. The best-known ones and the ones that are likely to endure are those about what a horrible decision it was.

If I had to make just one criticism of Unger's book, it would be that in his very useful and informative sketch of the history of the Christian Right, he fails to make clear what a central role the politics of segregation and racism played in its formulation and the extent to which the neosegregationist outlook is identified with the Christian Right/Christian fundamentalist/Christian dominionist supporters.

This leads him astray, for example, when he repeats the press corps conventional wisdom about the 2004 election that it was primarily decided by "values" voters. He fails to ask how many of those who identified "values" as their key concern would ever have considered voting for a Democrat in any case, or how many of those were Southern and/or rural/small town whites. Because to a considerable part of the Christian Right base, "values" means "keeping us white folks safe from scary black people". Gays and immigrants may irritate them, too. But there is a heavy continuity between the old segregationist vote and today's Christianist vote. This is something the late Steve Gilliard was very good about reminding us. And he was right. You can't understand the Christian Right voting phenomenon without understanding its connection with segregationist and now what I call neosegregationist sentiments.

He also seems to be hanging on to the notion that Colin Powell is somehow a tragic but sympathetic figure who was victimized by the neocons. I have no sympathy for Powell's role in the Iraq War catastrophe. He knew that Cheney's people were trying to scam the country into war. And his presentation at the United Nations in February 2002 was key to enabling the war. He had every reason to know what he was going was irresponsible, and that he was facilitating an unnecessary and illegal war. But he did it anyway. To Unger's credit, despite his seeming sympathy for Powell, he describes how Powell's ignored his own State Department's intelligence specialists in the preparation of that infamous UN presentation.

Unger's acceptance of the misleading "values" version of the 2004 election leads him astray into accepting a flawed Culture War framework of American politics, with particular reference to 2004:

By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq - the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue, evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned U.S. policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.

This is an example of the journalistic habit of providing "balance" by making both sides of a controversy sound equally to blame or equally deserving of consideration. But the impression this view leaves is very misleading. For Christianist "culture warriors", the Iraq War does indeed serve as a litmus test for their rejection of the dirty hippies and rampaging evil black people of their fantasies. This is why what support their is left for the Cheney-Bush Iraq policy is restricted to conservative white Republicans, and even some of those have faltered.

Most Americans, though, have a far more pragmatic view of the Iraq War. You hardly need to approve of hippie communes with mass orgies on the weekends to see it doesn't make any sense to keep 160,000 American troops fighting in a conflict where the protracted conflict itself has become more of a problem than leaving could cause. There are "both sides" to culture war issues like gay marriage. But when it comes to the Iraq War, there's basically only one side that sees it as organically tied to abstinence-only education and literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, christianism, craig unger, dick cheney, fall of the house of bush, iran-contra, iraq war, michael ledeen, richard perle

Well, that didn't take long

Burn the witch!

The motto of the Cheney-Bush administration often seems to be, "Allies? We don't need no stinkin' allies!!

That came to mind when I saw the following story. On Monday, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was inagurated President of Argentina. Before the week was out, the ubiquitous anonymous administration officials were trying to discredit her by linking her and her political part to dirty business with the current second-favorite Latin American bogeyman for the US, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela: Argentine Leader Slams U.S. Allegations by Monte Reel and Juan Forero Washington Post 12/14/07; Un fiscal de EE UU dice que Chávez financió la campaña de Kirchner por Alejandro Rebossio El País(Spain) 14.12.2007; La prensa mundial reflejó la réplica de Cristina a EE.UU. La Nación 14.12.2007; Argentine Leader Faults U.S. on Inquiry by Alexei Barrionuevo New York Times 12/14/07; text of indictment in US v. Moises Maionica, et al.

Unlike Chávez is sometimes inclined to do, Fernández responded diplomatically, with no references to Bush as El Diablo or to the smell of sulfur. What she said was, without mentioning the US, "Hay ciertos personajes que parecen salidos de ficciones que montan operaciones basura. Países que más que países amigos quieren países empleados. Es su forma de operar en la política regional, pero no va a tener respuesta. Voy a seguir afirmando la relación con todos los países de la región y también nuestra relación con Venezuela". Which is diplomatic Spanish for, "Bite me."

After being sworn in, Fernández held meetings with foreign leaders including Chávez, Spanish Prince Felipe de Asturias, Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In her meeting with Chávez and presumably also with Uribe, she stressed to them her concern about getting former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt released from captivity by the Colombian FARC guerrilla force. Betancourt has been held in captivity for the past six years.

Argentina is not in any rational perception of the real world anti-American. Why those anonymous officials in the Cheney-Bush adminstration would be trying to alienate the incoming administration in Argentina, I don't know. But after seven years of this crowd in office, does it even make sense to ask about the reason? Do they need a reason? Just the suggestion that Argentina might be pushing, for instance, to ease tensions between Venezuela and Colombia, or to help Colombian find some peaceful solution to the intractable guerrilla war there, is probably enough for Dick Cheney to want to trash the Fernández administration. She also favors granting Venezuela full membership in the Mercosur trade bloc of Latin American nations.

Chancellor Reinaldo Gargano of Uruguay, a country with which Argentina has had rather touchy relations recently, was surprisingly supportive of Fernández. He said that some people (obviously referring to the Cheney-Bush administration) were uncomfortable with the improved relations that Argentina and other Latin American countries are pursuing with Venezuela. A senior Uruguan official said that the incident should be viewed as "una especie de esquema armado, destinado a deteriorar la imagen de la presidenta de la República Argentina" (a type of hostile scheme intended to damage the image of the President of the Republic of Argentina). Not to put too much weight on it, but "esquema armado" could be more literally translated as "armed scheme". I don't know what particular nuances attach to the phrase in Spanish diplomatic language. But I'm guessing it is meant to hint that something more elaborate than a single smuggling bust is involved.

For the Cheney-Bush administration, which actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez and encouraged another attempt, having Venezuela incorporated more and more into peaceful, active cooperation with its neighbors is a bad thing. It might reduce the possibilities for war and/or the reversal of Chávez "Bolivarian revolution".

But one of Fernández' priorities is to prosecute the chief perpetrators of the military junta that ruled Argentina in the later 70's and early 80's and carried out a brutal campaign of suppression known as the "dirty war", which she referred to in her inaguaral address as "the greatest genocide in our history". Maybe Cheney and some other officials thought that they could take refuge in Argentina after they left office and avoid being charged with domestic and international criminal violations over the Iraq War, the torture policy and other things.

Certainly, if any of them were paying attention to her inagural address to the Argentine Legislative Assembly on Monday, they might have been shocked at some of the (to Cheney) radical ideas she expressed. For instance, her insistance that in prosecuting perpetrators of crimes on behalf of the junta's rule, that the defendents be insured "all the rights and guarantees that other Argentines did not have" during the junta's own rule. An exotic concept indeed for the Cheney-Bush administration.

She even talked about combatting terrorism and used the phrase "human rights" when talking about it! More and more suspicious. She claims that respecting the human rights of accused terrorists is an important factor in the struggle against terrorism. Obviously, she hasn't heard of the ticking-nuclear-bomb scenario that justifies anything and everything in the civilize American way of doing things under Cheney and Bush. And she apparently has the notion that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, as some dang revolutionary or the other said one time. Pretty wild and crazy, if you ask me.

This also sounds kind of un-Cheney-like:

Finalmente, queremos en este mundo global también fijar nuestra posición en cuanto a una necesidad imperiosa, la reconstrucción del multilateralismo. Un mundo unilateral es un mundo más inseguro, más injusto.

[Finally, in this globalized world, we also want to focus on our position in regard to an imperative necessity, the reconstruction of multilateralism. A unilateral world is a world more insecure, more unjust.]

That sounds suspiciously like she's actually trying to insult our Dear Leader Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen, and his faithful servant Dark Lord Cheney. So if Cheney decides Argentina needs to be liberated before he leaves office, well, they only have their radical female president to blame. Cheney's probably saying to himself that he's disappointed with some of the Argentine leaders and generals, letting some dame tell them what to do; "They're not carrying the big stick I would have expected ... ", just like those Democrat wimps who let Pelosi push them around.

Man, this unipolar world business just isn't working out quite as well as nationalists like Cheney or his neoconservative friends seem to think. The surly natives is those lesser countries seem to have their own ideas about how they should operate in the world. Who would have imagined such a development?

Tags: argentina, bush doctrine, colombia, cristina fernández, dick cheney, hugo chávez, venezuela