In all probability, the launch failed because it came too soon after September 11. That could have been dangerously transparent. There are two main points to emphasize here. First, this quick early campaign showed a high degree of cohesion and organization. Second, they ran it up the flagpole and nobody saluted. The administration subsequently rolled out its product again, as former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card put it, in August 2002.* That time, as we know, it worked better.
This operation exposes more than administration eagerness to invade Iraq. It also exposes how the current White House deputizes public and private entities as branches of its own political operations, co-opting the other branches of government, the Republican Party, the press, the military, the intelligence community and even the states. This is an enlargement of presidential power unmatched in American history.
With a few heroic exceptions, there could be little resistance within the administration to dominance by the White House or to the invasion of a foreign country. Two weeks before March 11, Elizabeth Cheney, Vice President Cheney's daughter, had been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Near East section. One week before that date, her husband, Philip Perry, had transferred from Justice to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Thus government entities meant to bulwark fiscal probity (OMB), sane foreign policy (State), and process of law and civil liberties (Justice) were effectively sandbagged, not that this process took place overnight. Vice President Cheney's office was particularly well extended through the reaches of government. Along with Cheney's daughter in State and son-in-law in the OMB, then Federal Communications Commissioner Kevin Martin, now chairman of the FCC, is the husband of Cheney spokeswoman Cathie Martin. Thus anyone wishing to complain to the FCC about war-boosting by big media outlets would have seriously murky channels to navigate. Before going to the FCC, Martin had worked in the Bush campaign and the Bush-Cheney Transition Team; before that, he was an associate in DC law firm Wiley, Rein and Fielding, which offers its legal services on government contracts including Iraq contracts.
The husband of Cheney aide Nina Reese was former White House speechwriter Matthew R. Rees. Nina Rees had been an architect of the No Child Left Behind act that basically bought off Washington Post coverage on Bush. Matthew Rees later moved to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), working under SEC Chairman and longtime Bush friend William O. Donaldson. At the White House, Rees was Director for Foreign Policy Speechwriting on the National Security Council, writing for Bush, for Condoleezza Rice, and for Stephen Hadley. Hadley, then Deputy National Security Adviser and now National Security Adviser, was a "Project for the New American Century" teammate who came to government from the board of a little-known corporation named ANSER, which formed a "Homeland Security Institute" back in 1999. Previously, Rees wrote for the neocon Weekly Standard among other publications and was also a speechwriter for Robert B. Zoellick, another PNAC member, now appointed Deputy Secretary of State.
Even with this kind of deep bench, however, the launch on March 11 somewhat misfired. By March 12, 2002, Arab leaders were demurring about the whole thing, much of Europe was hinting opposition, and Tony Blair's government was backpedaling in England.
Nonetheless, the administration continued stealthy military actions in Kuwait, across the border from Iraq, and, according to the British press, even inside Iraq. Somewhat contradicting White House suggestions about the uniquely inexpressible threat represented by Saddam, U.S. Special Forces were already in Iraq by March, nominally training Iraqi militia there. Instructor teams had been arriving in Kurdish parts of Iraq over a period of weeks, according to the Guardian, teaching the Kurds how to work with chaos caused by U.S. air strikes and drawing up lists of targets for a ground offensive.
In Kuwait, a battalion of Longbow Apache helicopters arrived to join the more than 5,000 U.S. fighting vehicles left over from the Gulf War and now being overhauled.
In Afghanistan, assassinations of members of the Loya Girga, Afghani elders loyal to their own tribes and people rather than to western or foreign interests, continued as they had occurred from fall 2001.
With large media outlets so malleable and the administration campaign so thorough, it is a tribute to the residual power of public opinion that the PR blitz failed. The main reason must have been failure of nerve among insiders. They must have been uneasily aware, or some of them must have been aware, that boosting war against Iraq this soon after September 11 might raise suspicions about September 11 itself. It should have raised suspicions widely.
What a difference the attacks of September 11, 2001, made to the Bush administration regarding Iraq, aside from topics like energy and Enron. Six months before September 11, on March 11, 2001, the only big news about Iraq was that Iraqi children were dying as a result of sanctions by the West. As UNICEF and other international organizations and genuinely informed foreign affairs specialists warned, the chief effect of economic sanctions against Iraq was not to weaken Saddam or to enable his people to rise up against him, but to strengthen the grip of Saddam on his people while starving the people themselves. (Yes, the oil companies were right to oppose the sanctions, regardless of motive; if only they had opposed the invasion.)
Also six months before September 11, on March 11, 2001, the Kuwaiti National Assembly passed legislation newly permitting direct foreign capital investment in Kuwait. The legislation authorized up to 100 percent foreign ownership in Kuwaiti industries including infrastructure, communications, investment, information technology, transportation, etc. Virtually every industry except oil was opened up to foreign ownership.
The U.S. Commerce Department, which monitors these things, says that the law has generally not changed the climate for foreign investment in Kuwait. But foreign investment for insiders facilitated both 9/11 and the Iraq war, and in the opinion of this writer those Kuwaiti legislators unwittingly sealed the death warrants for those who perished in 9/11 and follow-up actions.
Apparently Bush personnel are trying to float a specious argument that a president cannot be impeached in his second term for actions taken in his first term, unless he was nailed in his first term. They should not be allowed to get away with it.
Hairsplitting violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, which was designed to protect citizens from abuses of power. One of the biggest abuses, most feared and loathed by the founders of the nation, was the potential of the executive to encroach. And one of the biggest abuses of power by the executive is starting a war or leading a nation into war for any interest other than the national interest.
Regardless of which actions were specifically ordered by Bush directly, the man at the top is responsible for what his people do, and this president was the man who put the neocon dream of invading the Middle East into practice. The very stealth with which this administration engaged in boosting war, the lack of boundaries with which it went outside government agencies to create government policy, and the aggression with which it went after political opponents and even mere critics or questioners, all demonstrate that the national interest was not paramount.
*See my "The Pens of August," published in the Progressive Populist and cited in David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine.
This operation exposes more than administration eagerness to invade Iraq. It also exposes how the current White House deputizes public and private entities as branches of its own political operations, co-opting the other branches of government, the Republican Party, the press, the military, the intelligence community and even the states. This is an enlargement of presidential power unmatched in American history.
With a few heroic exceptions, there could be little resistance within the administration to dominance by the White House or to the invasion of a foreign country. Two weeks before March 11, Elizabeth Cheney, Vice President Cheney's daughter, had been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Near East section. One week before that date, her husband, Philip Perry, had transferred from Justice to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Thus government entities meant to bulwark fiscal probity (OMB), sane foreign policy (State), and process of law and civil liberties (Justice) were effectively sandbagged, not that this process took place overnight. Vice President Cheney's office was particularly well extended through the reaches of government. Along with Cheney's daughter in State and son-in-law in the OMB, then Federal Communications Commissioner Kevin Martin, now chairman of the FCC, is the husband of Cheney spokeswoman Cathie Martin. Thus anyone wishing to complain to the FCC about war-boosting by big media outlets would have seriously murky channels to navigate. Before going to the FCC, Martin had worked in the Bush campaign and the Bush-Cheney Transition Team; before that, he was an associate in DC law firm Wiley, Rein and Fielding, which offers its legal services on government contracts including Iraq contracts.
Even with this kind of deep bench, however, the launch on March 11 somewhat misfired. By March 12, 2002, Arab leaders were demurring about the whole thing, much of Europe was hinting opposition, and Tony Blair's government was backpedaling in England.
Nonetheless, the administration continued stealthy military actions in Kuwait, across the border from Iraq, and, according to the British press, even inside Iraq. Somewhat contradicting White House suggestions about the uniquely inexpressible threat represented by Saddam, U.S. Special Forces were already in Iraq by March, nominally training Iraqi militia there. Instructor teams had been arriving in Kurdish parts of Iraq over a period of weeks, according to the Guardian, teaching the Kurds how to work with chaos caused by U.S. air strikes and drawing up lists of targets for a ground offensive.
In Kuwait, a battalion of Longbow Apache helicopters arrived to join the more than 5,000 U.S. fighting vehicles left over from the Gulf War and now being overhauled.
In Afghanistan, assassinations of members of the Loya Girga, Afghani elders loyal to their own tribes and people rather than to western or foreign interests, continued as they had occurred from fall 2001.
With large media outlets so malleable and the administration campaign so thorough, it is a tribute to the residual power of public opinion that the PR blitz failed. The main reason must have been failure of nerve among insiders. They must have been uneasily aware, or some of them must have been aware, that boosting war against Iraq this soon after September 11 might raise suspicions about September 11 itself. It should have raised suspicions widely.
What a difference the attacks of September 11, 2001, made to the Bush administration regarding Iraq, aside from topics like energy and Enron. Six months before September 11, on March 11, 2001, the only big news about Iraq was that Iraqi children were dying as a result of sanctions by the West. As UNICEF and other international organizations and genuinely informed foreign affairs specialists warned, the chief effect of economic sanctions against Iraq was not to weaken Saddam or to enable his people to rise up against him, but to strengthen the grip of Saddam on his people while starving the people themselves. (Yes, the oil companies were right to oppose the sanctions, regardless of motive; if only they had opposed the invasion.)
Also six months before September 11, on March 11, 2001, the Kuwaiti National Assembly passed legislation newly permitting direct foreign capital investment in Kuwait. The legislation authorized up to 100 percent foreign ownership in Kuwaiti industries including infrastructure, communications, investment, information technology, transportation, etc. Virtually every industry except oil was opened up to foreign ownership.
The U.S. Commerce Department, which monitors these things, says that the law has generally not changed the climate for foreign investment in Kuwait. But foreign investment for insiders facilitated both 9/11 and the Iraq war, and in the opinion of this writer those Kuwaiti legislators unwittingly sealed the death warrants for those who perished in 9/11 and follow-up actions.
Apparently Bush personnel are trying to float a specious argument that a president cannot be impeached in his second term for actions taken in his first term, unless he was nailed in his first term. They should not be allowed to get away with it.
Hairsplitting violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, which was designed to protect citizens from abuses of power. One of the biggest abuses, most feared and loathed by the founders of the nation, was the potential of the executive to encroach. And one of the biggest abuses of power by the executive is starting a war or leading a nation into war for any interest other than the national interest.
Regardless of which actions were specifically ordered by Bush directly, the man at the top is responsible for what his people do, and this president was the man who put the neocon dream of invading the Middle East into practice. The very stealth with which this administration engaged in boosting war, the lack of boundaries with which it went outside government agencies to create government policy, and the aggression with which it went after political opponents and even mere critics or questioners, all demonstrate that the national interest was not paramount.
*See my "The Pens of August," published in the Progressive Populist and cited in David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine.
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