1 Boring Old Man

^{I know that my last four posts cover well traveled ground and are kind of boring. I did them because I wanted the pieces to the puzzle all together in one box. I know that there are a number of other documents that speak to this topic, but I thought these twelve were a good summary to make my case.}

Former Vice President Dick Cheney holds to a broad set of ideas about the direction America’s foreign policy should take. They are not his ideas alone, but he’s been the face on them for a long time. At the core, they involve a preeminent military strength, unequaled by that of any other nation – opportunizing on the fall of the Soviet Bloc.  But unlike the version during the Cold War, he evisions an active military presence in the world, striking other opposing nations preemptively rather than waiting for provocative aggression. And he sees the war-making power of the United States as operating unfettered by the constraints and deliberations of world organizations like the United Nations. He would have our military might focused not only in a defensive posture, but actively engaged in promoting the interests of the United States, fostering Democratic governments like ours in other countries, and actively promoting the goals of the American business community in its worldwide endeavors – something of a merger between our commercial interests and our political interests in an America dominant foreign policy.

This policy made its debut in a leaked Defense Planning Guidance created by his Deputies when Cheney was Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush to the general horror of most who read it, and was hastily withdrawn and rewritten. Throughout the Clinton Presidency, these ideas went underground, mostly talked about in the Halls on the American Enterprise Institute where Cheney and the group who also favored this approach spent that period. Cheney himself became the CEO of Halliburton, a large company involved in oil exploration among other things. In a speech in 1998, he made it clear that he thought that the commercial interests of the United States should be a part of our foreign policy, along with other interests. And the following year, in another speech, he pointed to the Middle East as the prime object for future oil exploration.

Meanwhile in 1997, Cheney was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, an offshoot of the Conservative Think-Tank the American Enterprise Institute. Their first order of business was to write a letter to then President Bill Clinton urging him to unseat Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, citing Hussein’s many defiant actions since we had driven him from Kuwait in 1991. The PNAC went on to publish a Report criticising Clinton’s handling of the Defense Budget and reviving the foreign policy of Cheney’s Defense Department under President George H.W. Bush. Soon, Dick Cheney himself became George W. Bush’s running mate, and became Vice President in January 2001. His first act as VP was to assemble an Energy Task Force that included his colleagues from the American Energy Companies. The proceedings of that Task Force remain secret, but we do know that they used map of Iraq with areas unexplored for oil marked out in blocks.

^{While there’s no proof, I personally think the Bush Administration ignored warnings about al Qaeda in part because they believed that the Terrorists were backed by the Arab States [like Iraq or Iran], but also that they vaguely hoped that another al Qaeda attack might serve as a provocation that would give them a shot at making a case for war with Iraq. I doubt they expected anything so grand as the 9/11 attack – maybe something more like the bombing of the Embassy in Kenya or the attack on the U.S. Cole.}

Then came the September 11th, 2001 attack on the Twin Trade Towers in New York, and the country was changed forever. At that point, most of us knew nothing of their designs on Iraq. And we had hardly heard of al Qaeda. But in the Department of Defense, on that day, Donald Rumsfeld questioned whether we should retaliate against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq immediately along with Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda. He also tasked Paul Wolfowitz to begin gathering evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda. When Congress responded by giving President Bush the power to respond against the perpetrators of the attack using our military, in the Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General John Yoo quickly wrote a secret legal Memo stating that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress also gave the President other powers:

The President has constitutional power not only to retaliate against any person, organization, or State suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on the United States, but also against foreign States suspected of harboring or supporting such organizations.

The President may deploy military force preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11.

Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.