1 Boring Old Man

Bush trip to Switzerland called off

amid threats of protests, legal action
Washington Post
By Peter Finn
February 6, 2011

^{A planned trip to Switzerland this week by George W. Bush was canceled after human rights activists called for demonstrations and threatened legal action over allegations that the former president sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights and several European human rights groups said they were planning to file a complaint against Bush and wanted Swiss prosecutors to open a criminal case against him once he arrived in the country.}

^{In what would have been his first European trip since leaving office, Bush was scheduled to speak in Geneva on Feb. 12 at a dinner in honor of the United Israel Appeal. A lawyer for the organization said that Bush’s appearance was canceled because of the risk of violence, and that the threat of legal action was not an issue. "The calls to demonstrate were sliding into dangerous terrain," the lawyer, Robert Equey, told the Swiss daily Tribune de Geneve.}

^{A spokesman for Bush said the former president regretted that his speech was canceled. "President Bush was looking forward to speaking about freedom and offering reflections from his time in office"…}

Don Rumsfeld, playing a dead-end game in his memoir
Washington Post
By Dana Milbank
February 6, 2011

^{…. after four years of reflection, Rumsfeld remains dismissive of those less brilliant than he is – which is pretty much everybody.}

^{•The National Security Council: "I didn’t think the NSC was doing its job well."}
^{•Iraq administrator Jerry Bremer: "I would have entered Iraq with a notably different mind-set had I been in Bremer’s shoes."}
^{•National security adviser and then Secretary of State Condi Rice: "Taking on an operational role in Iraq was a grievous mistake."}
^{•The generals: "There were many times when the decisions on the ground didn’t seem right – such as the first battle of Fallujah – but I took pains to try not to micromanage."}
^{•And President Bush: "It is fair to ask," he writes, why differences "between State and Defense were not better resolved… . Only the president could do so."}
^{•Rumsfeld, for his part, fingers Bremer as "reluctant to cede any significant authority" to the Iraqis. He "strenuously objected" to reconstituting the Iraqi army, and he "argued against" having the Pentagon handle Iraqi police training.}
^{•Surprisingly, Rumsfeld blames his own generals, too. "General Franks told me in 2008 that, in hindsight, his recommendation to stop the flow of additional troops into Iraq … might have been a mistake," Rumsfeld confides. And: "Generals [John] Abizaid and [George] Casey were still uneasy with the idea of deploying more troops."}
^{•Continuing the feud that plagued his tenure, he blames the State Department for just about everything. The ill-fated de-Baathification "was promoted in the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project." The Pentagon’s training of Iraqi police was delayed by "objections of some in the State Department bureaucracy" and Powell’s "turf-conscious deputy," Richard Armitage.}
^{•Ultimately, he blames the president because Bush never "firmly resisted" State. "There were far too many hands on the steering wheel, which, in my view, was a formula for running the truck into a ditch," he writes.}

So personally, to have the Bush era fading is a blessed relief from a painful cloud that stretched from 2002 until recently. It’s there, but in the background. I still keep up with the luminaries from back then, and I’m the only person I know who watches the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry in the UK. But Bu$hCo is not always on my mind like it was. I’m awed at how the country seems to have pushed it out of our discourse. We’re just at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, without much discussing how we got there. We’re in a peach of an economic quagmire with a towering National Debt without talking about where it came from. Even the Conservatives overlook the intervening years and talk as if Ronald Reagan was the last Republican President. It’s a historical blank spot in our everyday discussions.

But the Bush presidency lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body. In my own mind, I can’t escape the conclusion that my crusader rabbit juices currently focused of the goings on in my medical specialty [Psychiatry] are the direct heir of those left over from the Bu$hCo time in grade. The topic is the same – fraud, a hidden self-serving agenda, the perversion of principles, the conscious lies, etc. And I am thinking that the Bush era hangs over the current goings-on in Egypt. America is a non-player and really has no place at the table. It’s not that we’ve supported Mubarak. It’s that no one cares what we think about the Middle East. Their [Bu$hCo’s] grand design has essentially rendered us irrelevant. Not that our being out of the driver’s seat is so bad, but we could’ve gotten there by a much easier route. More to the point, where is the U.N. in all of this? I haven’t heard a peep from the U.N. Our ignoring the U.N. in our Middle East mis-adventures seems to have sidelined the U.N. That’s not a thought I enjoy having.

In my career, I spent a lot of time working with patients whose entire lives were adversely colored by the actions of others. It’s called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I would periodically find myself awed and feeling overwhelmed by the damage a single person could do, sometimes without malevolent intent or without even giving the impact of their actions any thought. In many cases, the people who caused the damage knew what they had done, but later continued to explain it from their perspective and dismiss its obvious ramifications. Self-justification is such a human trait that afflicts us all [including yours truly]. We seem to always end up being the heros of our own biographies. In spite of my disappointment in Powell’s U.N. speech back in 2002, he’s the only person from that time who hasn’t blamed others for his failings and who has said that he regrets what he did back then. He’s also the only one we still respect.