And how did then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld respond when an Army National Guard specialist had the temerity to ask his boss in public why they were having to cannabilize their own vehicles to provide the necessary armoring? "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time," said Rumsfeld coldly, effectively verifying that CheneyBush had rushed into war without adequate equipment or contingency planning. Thousands of U.S. troops have died or been horribly maimed in the interim.
7. "HECKUVA JOB, BROWNIE"
Here's one Bush quote that never grows old:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Well, yes, of course he mis-spoke.
But the subtext bespeaks a truth. Naomi Klein's brilliant book "The Shock Doctrine" ( www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/klein.htm ) rests upon the assumption that Bush&Co. would prefer their disastrous behavior and policies be seen as evidence of "incompetentcy" rather than admit that their underlying goal is to sow chaos and confusion and fright as ways of implementing their social, political, economic agendas. So when Bush told Michael Brown that he was doing a "heckuva job, Brownie" running the Administration's post-Katrina response, he was telling the truth -- but from a "shock doctrine" standpoint.
8. RUMFELD'S "QUICK" WAR
Rumsfeld is a running fount of wonderful quotes. One of my favorites came just before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, when the public was torn about the wisdom of attacking that country. It was important to make the impending war seem a fait accompli that would be just a minor, temporary blip on the American political radar screen.
So when a reporter asked him how long he envisioned this imperial adventure might last in Iraq, Rummy replied : "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Similarly, members of Congress wanted to know how much the war would cost U.S. taxpayers. Telling the truth, that the costs could run into the hundreds of billions and then trillions, would have been unacceptable to Congress and the American people, so Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary of Defense, said blithely that the costs weren't a problem, since the Iraqis would finance the war and reconstruction out of their huge oil revenues. "There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money," said Wolfy.
A final Rumsfeld quote: Reporters kept asking him where the supposed caches of "weapons of mass destruction" were in Iraq, since the invading troops hadn't found any. Without missing a beat, Rumsfeld replied that U.S. forces were right on the scent: "We know where they are. They're in and around Tikrit...north, east, south and west of Baghdad."
Subtext: The Administration was lying through its collective teeth about the real problems associated with an invasion and occupation and nation-building. Furthermore, they were totally winging it in Iraq, with nary a clue how to proceed. But they would keep going, deeper into the Big Muddy, because that's the only idea they had in their heads. And, because they were the only Superpower on the planet, they felt they could do whatever they wanted and the Iraqi public and the U.S. citizenry would be frightened into submission. Since their multinational corporate supporters (Halliburton, Bechtel, KBR, Blackwater, et al.) would make out like bandits in the nation-building stage, a stalemate of shock-doctrine chaos in Iraq was just fine for however many years it took.
9. THE "DISAPPEARING" INSURGENCY
Another doozy from Dick Cheney. The Administration could never admit in public that things weren't going swimmingly in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. To do so would be admitting that Bush was a fallible human being like the rest of us, and the fundamentalist part of the Republican base seemed eager to believe that Bush was an annointed servant of God and thus could do no wrong.
So Cheney, at the height of the insurgent attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere around Iraq, when so many U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians were being killed or maimed by suicide bombers and roadside explosives, told a questioner that there was no reason to worry, since the "insurgency is in its last throes." That was in May of 2005.
Subtext: One of the major goals of the U.S. occupation of Iraq was/is to make sure that any open American defeat will not happen during the CheneyBush tenure. If the next Administration were to be a Democratic one, they would be the ones having to admit that the war was lost and bring home the troops. The GOP could then claim that if only the CheneyBush policies had been permitted to continue after they left office, "victory" would have been possible, even likely. It's the old stab-in-the-back smear: Who "lost" China? Who "lost" Vietnam? Etc.
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).
it is a damn crying shame that these guys have not been brought to justice. we are all the worse off for it. there is more than enough evidence to impeach and incarcerate. if these guys get off scott free then the next tinhorn dictator wannnabe will have nothing to fear. there needs to be an accounting. justice must be served.
by
Levon (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 30 comments)
on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 10:17:28 AM
1 comments
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