1 Boring Old Man

Vanity Fair has fourteen pages of stories from Bush Administration officials posted. A trip down memory lane that brings back nausea from the past:

Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House

August 6, 2001 While vacationing at his ranch, in Crawford, Texas, Bush is given a Presidential Daily Briefing memorandum whose headline warns that the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, is “determined to strike in U.S.” After being briefed on the document by a C.I.A. analyst, Bush responds, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”

Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: We went into a period in June where the tempo of intelligence about an impending large-scale attack went up a lot, to the kind of cycle that we’d only seen once or twice before. And we told Condi that. She didn’t do anything. She said, Well, make sure you’re coordinating with the agencies, which, of course, I was doing. By August, I was saying to Condi and to the agencies that the intelligence isn’t coming in at such a rapid rate anymore as it was in the June-July time frame. But that doesn’t mean the attack isn’t going to happen. It just means that they may be in place.

On September 4, we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator [remote-controlled drone] flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration because the technology wasn’t ready: put a weapon on the Predator and use it as not only a hunter but a killer.

We had seen bin Laden when we had it in the Clinton administration, as just a hunter. We had seen him. So we thought, Man, if we could get this with a hunter-killer, we could see him again and kill him. So finally we have a principals meeting and the C.I.A. says it’s not our job to fly the Predator armed. And D.O.D. says it’s not our job to fly an unarmed aircraft. I just couldn’t believe it. This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of C.I.A. sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden…

Richard Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him—at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him—like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said—I’ll never forget this—There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center…

June 1, 2002 In a graduation speech at West Point, Bush advances a new strategic doctrine of pre-emption, stating that the United States reserves the right to use force to deal with threats before they “fully materialize.” Preparations for war with Iraq are not yet publicly acknowledged, but earlier in the spring, as Condoleezza Rice discusses diplomatic initiatives involving Iraq with several senators, Bush pokes his head into the room and says, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”

December 6, 2006 The independent Iraq Study Group, chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, issues a report setting out 79 recommendations for the future conduct of the Iraq war. The report is brushed aside by the president. Lawrence Eagleburger, one of the group’s members, says of Bush after the report is delivered, “I don’t recall, seriously, that he asked any questions.”

Alan K. Simpson, former senator from Wyoming and a member of the Iraq Study Group: It was an early-morning session, seven a.m., I think, breakfast, the day we trotted it out. And Jim and Lee said, Mr. President, we will—and Dick was there, Cheney was there—just go around the room, if you would, and all of us share with you a quick thought? And the president said fine. I thought at first the president seemed a little—I don’t know, just maybe impatient, like, What now?

He went around the room. Everybody stated their case. It just took a couple minutes. I know what I said. I said, Mr. President, we’re not here to present this to vex or embarrass you in any way. That’s not the purpose of this. We’re in a tough, tough situation, and we think these recommendations can help the country out. We’ve agreed on every word here, and I hope you’ll give it your full attention. He said, Oh, I will. And I turned to Dick, and I said, Dick, old friend, I hope you’ll gnaw on this, too. This is very important that you hear this and review it. And he said, I will, I will, and thanks.

Then the president gave an address not too far after that. And we were called by [National-Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley on a conference call. He said, Thank you for the work. The president’s going to mention your report, and it’ll be—there will be parts of it that he will embrace, in fact, and if he doesn’t happen to speak on certain issues, you know that they’ll be in full consideration in the weeks to come, or something like that. And we all listened with a wry smile.

We figured that maybe 5 of the 79 recommendations would ever be considered, and I think we were pretty right.

Lee Hamilton: Cheney was there, never said a word, not a — of course, the recommendations from his point of view were awful, but he never criticized. Bush was very gracious, said we’ve worked hard and did this great service for the country—and he ignored it so far as I can see. He fundamentally didn’t agree with it. President Bush has always sought, still seeks today, a victory, military victory. And we did not recommend that. The gist of what we had to say was a responsible exit. He didn’t like that.

Bush and Cheney just ignored the report. It might as well have never happened. Instead, we got a new General and a "surge." After a predictable period, violence fell and we heard endlessly, "the surge is working." Whatever that means.

It’s like we didn’t have a government full of experts trying to deal with our problems. We had a few men who essentially did what they wanted to do. And many of their decisions were more about showing that they were in charge – like proposing Harriet Miers for a Supreme Court Judgeship. She was someone Bush knew and she was a lawyer. Those were her only qualifications that I can see. Then there was Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, or Michael Brown as head of F.E.M.A. Neither was remotely qualified. Many of their appointments and decisions have felt like they’re intended to make a mockery of a real government. The crowning example was appointing John Bolton as Ambassador to the U.N. – knowing he was unacceptable to the Senate or, for that matter, anyone else who knew who he was.  John Bolton was opposed to the U.N. even existing. He’d spent his time at the American Enterprise Institute raling endlessly against the U.N. [when he wasn’t fomenting to bomb Iran].