1 Boring Old Man

I know I’m not the one to summarize the 2005 political scene [but I’m going to do it anyway]. This is the introduction:

We know from the books by Richard Clarke and Paul Oniell that George Bush was already thinking about war with Iraq before the Twin Trade Tower attack, had shown little interest in reports about Al Qaeda, and that he was still focusing on Iraq afterwards. The fall of 2001 was chaotic – the war in Afghanistan, and a preoccupation with homeland security. But we now know that in spite of Congress saying no to surveillance inside the U.S., the N.S.A. began extensive eavesdropping without warrants during that period. By June of 2002, Bush was making a graduation speech at West Point outlining what is called the Bush Doctrine, laying the groundwork for unilateral military action in Iraq. We know from the Downing Street Memos in July that the war plans were in place, and the reasons were to be Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and their Weapons of Mass Destruction program – trumped up if necessary. In August 2002, the Administration formed the White House Iraq Group to lobby for the war and by September Bush was speaking against Iraq in the U.N.

About this time, there was the flurry of fantastic articles about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, primarily from Judith Miller of the New York Times, and a media blitz from the members of the Cabinet. In January 2003 Bush used the State of the Union speech to slam Iraq [part of the ‘Axis of Evil’], implying that their Weapons program was active and there was immediate danger. By this time, the Niger Uranium story had been thoroughly debunked, but he used it anyway. He made another trip to the U.N. followed by Colin Powell’s now infamous U.N. presentation. During the leadup to the war, we apparently bugged members of the U.N. Security Council to determine if they were going to support the war. In spite of they evidence that the two big Intelligence reports, the Niger Uranium story and the Aluminum Tube fantasy, were fallacious, and the non-support of the U.N., the pressure to go to war escalated, and we invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The roots for the march to war in Iraq were not related to the September 11, 2001 Twin Trade Tower bombing as we were told. They came from long before. Following George H. W. Bush’s war with Iraq in 1991, there was apparently a strong current of feeling that we should not have limited that war to expelling Hussein from Kuwait as proscribed by the U.N. Following the war, Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Planning [under Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense] wrote a Defense Planning Guidance that was opposed by Colin Powell [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and others, and was ultimately watered down by Mr. Cheney before it was published in 1992. That original document was virtually identical to what is now called The Bush Doctrine, reintroduced by George W. Bush in June 2002 at West Point:

• Preemption: A policy of pre-emptive war, should the US or its allies be threatened by terrorists or by rogue states that are engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction.
• Unilateralism: The right of the US to pursue unilateral military action when acceptable multi-lateral solutions cannot be found.
• Strength Beyond Challenge: The policy that United States has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, indicating the US intends to take actions as necessary to continue its status as the world’s sole military superpower.
• Extending Democracy, Liberty, and Security to All Regions: A policy of actively promoting democracy and freedom in all regions of the world.

Just so as to not leave out anyone, Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie had written the book, Saddam Hussein & the Crisis in the Gulf, in 1990 that preceded the Gulf War.

I think George H. W. Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton must’ve come as a big shock. The Republican Neoconservatives had dreamed that the Reagan Era would last forever. They retreated to the American Enterprise Institute, a heavily funded Think Tank with a heavy Neoconservative and Zionist influence. Why war with Iraq became their unabiding passion isn’t clear to me, but it did. So, for eight years, they fumed and schemed at 1150 17th Street in Washington, pouring out articles and books opposing almost any thought Clinton had, and plotting their war with Iraq. In 1998, the Neoconservatioves formed the Project for the New American Century [same address] whose first act was a letter to President Clinton concluding:

During that time, Mylroie and Miller continued to champion the apocalyptic conspiracy theories of Hussein’s evilness. One of the points that thematizes the writings of the whole group was that Clinton and the C.I.A. were mistaken in focusing attention on individuals [like bin Laden]. We needed to focus on "States" [like Iraq]. When George W. Bush got elected, he imported this entire group of post-Reaganite Neoconservatives into his government, and they were soon off and running to effect their policies. September 11th, 2001 wasn’t the cause of something, it was a reason to do what they had been planning for a decade -gaining American Dominion over the World Politik.

So the war with Iraq was in the cards from the start.  They quickly subverted to War on Terror to their American Dominion agenda and their centerpiece Iraqi War. I think they expected a heroic conquest like in the first Gulf War, and they got it in a way. Two months into the war, Bush flew [assisted] in a combat jet, landing on an Aircraft Carrier, to declare that the war was over. His Captain America victory flight is marked on the graph with a dashed line:

But then things began to unravel. They didn’t find their fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction. Judith Miller went riding across Iraq wearing tailored desert fatigues with the soldiers, helping them not find what they were looking for. The Press was beginning to question her pre-war reporting, and to ask about the Intelligence that had been so widely touted. Then, retired Ambassador, Joseph Wilson, published an oped piece describing a trip he’d taken at the request of the C.I.A. to look into some of that Intelligence and that he’d found it to be without basis. He questioned whether or not Bush had "cooked the books." His article didn’t get that much play, but the Administration reaction to it did. The identity of his wife, C.I.A. Secret Agent Valerie Plame, was leaked to the Press – implying she’d gotten Wilson a boondoggle trip. In the aftermath, a Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald got appointed to look into the leak.

As the winter wore on, I began to haunt the Internet. I found out about the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, Neoconservativism, Laurie Mylroie, Judith Miller, Ahmad Chalabi. I began to bore my friends and wife to death with an endless stream of details. I became a former Psychiatrist who was sounding a lot like an obsessed paranoid patient instead of someone with any distance. A few friends were in the same boat, so I got to talk about all of this in emails, and became a little bit less personally oppressive. When I got back from a trip to Mexico in May, there was an email from one of those friends that pointed to something called The Downing Street Memos. It was, for me, the first solid, undeniable piece of evidence that all my ranting about Bush’s war being trumped up was true. I felt a palpable sense of relief! I wasn’t just some old retired guy with not much to do going crazy with conspiracy theories to fill the hours. I was some old retired guy with not much to do going crazy with conspiracy theories because our country is being run by a pack of neofascist liars. Somehow, that’s better.

Three things happened. My daughter, noting my propensity to send letters to editors and comment on her blog gave me a blog of my own, and introduced me to bloglines.com where I could follow the increasing number of political blogs that were focusing on the goings on in Washington and Iraq. And then there came a guy on a white horse named Patrick Fitzgerald, who put Judith Miller in jail. And finally, over the Fourth of July weekend, Lawrence O’Donnell announced on the McLaughlin Group that Matthew Cooper’s source for the C.I.A. leak was Karl Rove! We weren’t insane [‘we’ being the people who were fuming about the arrogant Administration that had taken over the White House, who seemed bullet-proof with their program of Press manipulation and their constant stream of contemptuous Talking Points]. There are two meanings to the word "madness," and they’re hard to distinguish – both from the inside and from the outside.

So on to a less personal retrospective of 2005 [tomorrow]. How’s that for a not very brief intro to 2005?