President Lyndon Johnson gave up his chance for re-election in hopes that the ongoing Vietnam War eventually would resurrect his political reputation and land him a place of honor in history. George W. Bush sacrificed Donald Rumsfeld in the hope that by jettisoning that unpopular baggage, the ongoing Iraq War (and perhaps the attack on Iran that is coming) eventually will demonstrate that he was right and that history will rebuild his historical legacy.
It didn't happen for LBJ -- the war, which lasted for seven more years, resulted in a death-total of 58,000 American troops and at least two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians -- and it's not likely to happen for Bush, who is planning on having a strong U.S. presence in Iraq for at least a decade or more.
Both presidents ignored the central fact at the heart of their self-made disasters: Their wars were unnecessary, tragically wrong from the outset, based on lies, deceptions, and gross misreadings of the cultures they invaded and occupied.
When the foundations of your house are rotten, you can't expect it to stand straight and tall, especially when you put great weight and stress on it; and no amount of last-minute jerry-rigged repairs will make it right. The misbegotten house skews, twists, eventually collapses. That's CheneyBush's Iraq War.
In short, Bush, already widely believed to be one of the worst presidents in American history, will not have the legacy he so desperately wants, that of a historical giant who, in the space of a few years, transformed the Greater Middle East by bringing "democracy" and free-market capitalism to the region.
Instead, he will be remembered as the American president, ignorant and uncaring as to consequences and cultures, who recklessly stirred the pot of chaos in that area of the world and wound up commiting numerous war crimes, endangering the national security of the United States and creating more anti-American terrorists all around the globe. He also will be remembered as the president who, in the name of bringing democracy to the world, trampled it at home.
In other words, Dick Cheney won.
EXIT, STAGE RIGHT
One by one, the other key players -- a good share of whom were incompetent or at least over their heads to begin with -- were overwhelmed and forced out by Cheney, the master of political intrigue, duplicity and cutthroat infighting.
John Ashcroft, a hardline supporter of the Patriot Act who once told Congress that criticism of his hardline police tactics gave "aid and comfort" to terrorists, resigned as U.S. Attorney General in November of 2004. Everyone wondered why. Only recently did we learn that a few months before that, Ashcroft, Deputy AG James Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller had threatened to resign over Bush's warrantless data-mining of American citizens' phone records and emails unless the program were brought under judicial review. Ashcroft's days were numbered.
Colin Powell, something of a voice of reason (at least in the context of the ideological zealotry in the rest of the CheneyBush Administration) fought the good fight against the neo-cons Rumsfeld and Cheney before being forced to resign. His moral low point was allowing himself to be forced into the role of chief war-apologist when he delivered his embarrassing list of reasons to attack Iraq before the United Nations in early 2003. He later sort-of owned up to his mistake, one of the few Administration leaders to do so, even if belatedly and over-cautiously.
Paul Wolfowitz, along with Cheney and Rumsfeld one of the key architects of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, was eased out and kicked upstairs to the World Bank, to cover that flank of CheneyBush imperial policy. But his managerial incompetence and neo-connish arrogance led to his removal.
Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security, was eased out for a hard-line Bushie, Michael Chertoff. Ridge later admitted that a lot of the security "alerts" he announced were ordered from above, not because there was actionable intelligence to justify raising the threat level. Often, when the Administration was suffering some bad news or a new scandal, Ridge would appear to issue those fear-mongering "alerts."
Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war, took the fall for the years of CheneyBush's disastrous policies and inept management of the occupation. The hope was that the pressure of criticism would lessen after Rumsfeld was forced out. But again, as bumbling as Rumsfeld was, it wasn't the secretary's conduct that was the cental problem, it was the war/occupation itself, a war based on mendacities, deceptions, and self-deceptions. Both Cheney and Bush, so psychologically and ideologically insecure, could never admit to that colossal error of judgement.
Scooter Libby, Cheney's powerful chief of staff, took the fall for Rove and Cheney and Bush, and then, when Bush commuted his sentence, didn't have to serve a day in jail for commiting perjury and obstruction of justice in the case involving the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby's replacement, David Addington, reportedly is, if you can imagine it, even more authoritarian and ruthless than his predecessor.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
i remember being quite sure that the alerts were political in nature. you say that ridge admitted it? i never saw that.
do you have any links?
thanks for your good work.
joanB
by
Joan Brunwasser (172 articles, 3594 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 674 comments)
on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 9:24:11 PM
2 comments
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