Madison, WI (OpEdNews) March 14, 2008
No one doubts that the Bush administration plays hardball politics and brooks no opposition. The depths of this attitude toward winning at all costs has been illustrated in many ways across a broad spectrum of issues, including standing up for telecommunications corporations to render them free from liability for conducting surveillance on the American people. Considerations of what would be in the best interests of the American people, what would uphold the rule of law and the principles of the Constitution to which Bush and Cheney have sworn an oath, simply do not matter. And similarly for those who cross them.
The most familiar example, no doubt, is the outing of Valerie Plame after her husband, Joseph Wilson, published a column in The New York Times (“What I Didn’t Find in Africa”, July 6, 2003). Former Ambassador Wilson explained that he had been dispatched to Niger in order to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to obtain yellowcake for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons, which the administration had been touting as a major reason for invading Iraq. Wilson’s column in the nation’s newspaper of record was therefore extremely embarrassing to the Bush brain-trust, including Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld.
Based upon Patrick Fitzgerald’s extensive investigation, we now know that Cheney, Scooter Libby and Carl Rove, among others, initiated retaliation against Wilson by exposing the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Robert Novak and other reporters were employed as conduits to disclose this information, which was highly classified. Most of this is well known to the American people, except that Plame was supervising a covert network of operatives across several nations concerned with constraining the proliferation of nuclear weapons, including in the Middle East. Her exposure nullified its viability, almost certainly leading to the death of covert contacts and destroying the efficacy of intelligence assets, including dummy CIA corporations.
The result was to make the United States vastly less safe and secure from nuclear threats than would otherwise have been the case. A more recent example raises equally disturbing questions about the commitment of this administration to the well-being of the American people. Virtually every serious student of military history agrees that the invasion of Iraq qualifies as the greatest blunder in American history, even outranking the travesty known as “Vietnam”. The cost alone has been projected to reach $3 trillion and is currently running $12 billion per month (“Iraq war’s economic toll grows”, The Capital Times, March 10, 2008). Most of them harbor no doubts that even the Iraq debacle would be overshadowed if the United States were now to launch an attack on Iran.
The administration’s attempts to vilify Iran by false translations of speeches by its leaders, by dubious reports of its attempts to develop nuclear weapons and by grossly exaggerated claims of Iranian involvement in the war in Iraq have caused considerable concern at home and abroad. Some of us have taken solace from the consideration that Admiral William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command and the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, has made it plain that there would be no invasion of Iran on his watch. That stance made him “The Man Between War and Peace” (Esquire, March 11, 2008), until Thomas P.M. Barnett published a substantial study that emphasized the extent to which Fallon’s stance was in conflict with that of the administration.
As those who have read Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (2008), understand, the President’s personality is such that he has a profound need to believe he is in charge – that he is “the decider” – whether or not that is the case. Cheney has astutely grasped his ego’s modus operandi by filling in the power vacuum created by the gap between Bush’s belief in his exercise of power and its remarkable limitations. Clearly, so long as he was not directly confronted with Fallon’s apostasy, Bush would not feel compelled to act to remove him. But Barnett’s article, which portrayed him rather than Bush as the man who stood between war and peace, appears to have enraged Bush and motivated him to remove his competitor. Bush has to be seen as “The Man Between War and Peace”, not Fallon.
Anyone who thinks this was the innocent outcome of a sincere effort to compose an article that expressed admiration for a brilliant admiral is missing a key piece of the puzzle. Barnett is the author of The Pentagon’s New Map (2004), which elaborates the theory that democratic states are non-belligerent states and outlines what appears to have become the administration’s road map for securing world domination during its second term in office. Fallon has to have come across to Barnett as an obstacle in the way of the realization of the grand scheme for (one or another version of) the new world order. By emphasizing Fallon’s differences from Bush, Barnett made it impossible for Bush not to act. By flattering Fallon, Barnett set Fallon’s head up on a tee.
On its face, the situation with respect to Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic governor of New York, looks completely different. If you buy the official story, “Revelations about Governor Began in Routine Tax Inquiry” (The New York Times, March 11, 2008), then of course the situation looks like Spitzer was just extremely unlucky to have been caught because of the suspicious nature of financial transactions intended to conceal his expenditures for high-priced prostitutes. But if you think about it, that is a most unlikely explanation. The sums involved here – a few thousand per assignation – are not sufficiently substantial to have drawn attention. And the elaborate length to which emphasis has been placed upon this mechanism of discovery suggests that it is a cover-up.
For Spitzer to have been another target of a Bush vendetta, however, would have required the performance of an action (as in the case of Joseph Wilson) or the expression of an attitude (as in the case of Admiral Fallon) that directly confronted basic aspects of the Bush administration’s public stance in ways that Bush and Cheney found threatening. I have therefore been astonished to discover that, just one month before his outing, Spitzer published a column in The Washington Post (Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime, February 14, 2008), in which he explained that the administration’s own policies of deliberate neglect and of favoring cronies were major factors that contributed to the home mortgage crisis, perhaps the greatest economic catastrophe of our time.
No one familiar with Bush’s personality could miss the impact an article like this would have on Bush’s self-concept. It is no leap of logic to infer that he must have been infuriated and, as in the case of Wilson and Fallon, wanted to strike out in retaliation on an enemy. That Spitzer’s fall should happen so shortly thereafter suggests that it was done out of vengeance to punish another voice speaking out about the dereliction of duty by his administration. It would not surprise me, either, if his equally strong commitment to reward his allies may be the reason he is going to such lengths to protect the telecommunications industry. Even with no legitimate security reasons for conducting surveillance of the American people, there could be many valuable political benefits, including gathering intelligence about the most intimate secrets of those who would criticize you.
