Bare hours after I offered the suggestion that Rumsfeld might try to bring down Bush, Steve Young of the Huffington Post heads in the same direction. That's the great drawback of an administration held together by the principle of universal blackmail: Everyone has something on somebody else. When one player is "axed" to leave, watch out.The humiliating leaks we've seen in recent days serve, I think, as mere preface.
How much damage can Rumsfeld do, presuming he intends to do damage? To answer that question, we must pinpoint the precise moment when the Iraq misadventure made the transition from a reckless power-grab to a full-fledged disaster.
That moment came when the occupation administrators received a sweeping de-Baathification order, which handed pink slips to all the lower-level Baath party functionaries. Suddenly, thousands of people who had joined Saddam's party only because their careers depended on a pro forma membership -- the managerial elite which actually ran the nation -- found that they had good reason to despise America.
Recall that Lt. General Jay Garner had originally envisioned a brief occupation, lasting just long enough for an orderly return of sovereignty to the Iraqis. After about a month, the administration fired him for his competence. Radical de-Baathification became policy as Garner handed his job over to Paul Bremer.
The question of "Who lost Iraq?" thus comes down to the question of "Who made that stupid decision?" True, one can argue that the war was lost the moment Bush said "Go" -- but the occupation became a lost cause with de-Baathification.
So who dunnit?
According to Bob Woodward's State of Denial, Bremer had received the command directly from Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's policy chief. Garner got on the phone and spoke to Feith's boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"This is not coming from this building," he replied. "That came from somewhere else."By "this building," Rumsfeld meant, of course, the Pentagon. Was he lying? Did he simply want a quick end to the argument? Did he try to shift blame for reasons of bureaucratic jui-jitsu? Or did the order really come from outside?
Garner presumed that meant the White House, NSC or Cheney. According to other participants, however, the de-Baathification order was purely a Pentagon creation. Telling Garner it came from somewhere else, though, had the advantage for Rumsfeld of ending the argument.
Perhaps someone worked in the Pentagon but not for the Pentagon.
Feith is the fiercely pro-Israel neo-conster who helped author the notorious A Clean Break document. Some have accused him of showing greater loyalty to Israel than to America, although many in the administration (including Rumsfeld) have offered robust defenses against that charge. Evidence indicates that Feith intended to replace Saddam with Ahmad Chalabi, "democratizing" Iraq by sustituting one corrupt thug for another.
Feith embraced and justified the de-Baathification policy. Rumsfeld, by contrast, retreated into a piano-player-in-the-whorehouse stance: "I just play music. I don't know what goes on upstairs."
The Iraq debacle has offered few words more haunting than these: This is not coming from this building. That came from somewhere else. Let those two sentences resound in your noggin. Plumb their deepest possible meaning. And then ask yourself whether administration scapegoat Rumsfeld is the party responsible for those damaging leaks.
7 comments:
I hope we find out where that order came from.... along with all of the craziest of crazy ideas. Maybe Rummy will spill Bush's beans... that might be very interesting.
More evidence of a schism in the administration between Bush and Cheney. They had a good thing going for six years. The Bush/Rove faction were responsible for stealing and holding onto the reins of power; the Cheney neocons were responsible for using that power. It worked well. Bush overlooked that the neocons were traitors in the service of Israel, Cheney overlooked that Bush was a narcissistic bisexual.
Unfortunately, somebody screwed up the wars. Maybe it had to do with the fact that nobody in the WH had ever fought one before. Then Rove screwed up the mid-term elections, mostly because of the Foley and Haggert scandals, but the blame for those also falls on the Bush team.
Firing Rumsfeld is Bush's shot across the neocon bow. And now the neocon Bolton is resigning, as well. The Bush faction is sending the Fed and Treasury chiefs to China to save the collapsing dollar, and the Saudis have summoned Cheney there to demand he stop the Shiite takeover of Iraq, while at home the two factions are warring over who screwed things up so badly.
Meanwhile, Bush 41 is preparing a plush refuge in Paraguay where the family can escape when the crash comes and guillotines are built.
Bush is titular President, and holds more explicit power than Cheney. But Cheney fights very dirty. Like you, Joe, I expect we will soon see evidence of his return fire. But my money is on Bush. I think Cheney will be forced to resign, and Condi instated as VP.
Bravo! Rose coloured glasses. Your vantage loft is so so penetrating. As we were forewarned by a famous general and president, way back when, "beware of the military industrial complex". The tentacles of that behemoth coupled with its enforcer the CIA, has buried US in a mountain of feces so deep and so tall that we can't see it for the size (and smell) It is overpowering.
When Kennedy fired the first shot at it by threatening to "scatter it to the winds"..he was scattered instead and the Viet Nam war took his place.
The invisible government had its birth in 1947 when Allen Dulles brought his new evil assets from Nazi Germany to create the CIA to continue Hitters' grand plans of world conquest and "multi national" corporate hegemony,
We are stuck wit it now no matter who dresses up like politician and pretends to care. Frank Church cared and we saw a peek into the belly of the beast but ever since that day, the shroud was pulled back over its hideous carcass..
Jimmy Carter did his best to clean the CIA whore house, but they returned the favor with the Iran Contra October Surprise, to yank him out of office and put in the closet nazi Reagan to unleash the corporations like never before.
So folks, we are faced with one more round of investigations and another opportunity to pick up our revolutionary cosmic vacuum cleaners again and suck out the demonic varmints in every nook and cranny of our nation.
RCG: I understand what you are saying and defer to your expertise. But I still have questions.
First, the career bureaucrats in the Pentagon -- and elsewhere -- would surely favor a more sensible de-Baathification policy, as opposed to the self-defeating insanity forced upon Bremer.
"Special interests" -- THAT phrase may well hold a key.
I cannot believe that such a policy was made lightly or at a low level. Iraq was lost due to a handful of key decisions -- really, really bad decisions. Those decisions were the undoing of the W presidency.
At any rate, I think we can all agree that we deserve an answer to my basic questions. Who decided upon radical de-Baathification? Why did Rummy say that the decision was made outside the Pentagon?
The obvious historical parallel would be to post-WW2 de-Nazification in Germany, which was pretty lenient. In fact, I used to think that the lenience shown in that period was outrageous, since some first-class war criminals were allowed to serve little or no time. Some, such as Gehlen, were granted more power than before, and they did much post-war mischief. I still think that de-Nazification should have been more stringent.
The Iraq example teaches us, however, that an occupying power must leave in place a managerial class which can halt a country's slide into chaos.
So why did the occupying powers show greater tolerance -- and arguably, greater wisdom -- in 1945-46 than in 2003-04?
well, joe, in altogether too succinct an answer to your last question, joe, i think the reason for all this chaos is the chaos itself. i've long suspected that none of those guys really wanted to stabilize, but to DEstabilize, thereby justifying the big military presence (read: spending), satisfying israel's excuse to be the bullies we are, and to keep the price of oil up. think of everyone who's benefitted; oil companies and defense contractors. no doubt exxon and ge were the biggest supporters of this war, and still are.
as for bremer, the frontline show in him and the iraq fiasco made a point of describing him as quite the lone wolf, and quoted rummy himself as saying something along the lines of how fiercely independent bremer has always been. don't know if such words are a setup, but there you have it.
some of this stuff we'll never really know. but time will tell on joe's premise; if rummy's going to bite back, we'll get to watch.
rosecovered glasses: I totally agree with you. Tom Engelhardt made a similar observation. No matter who is in "power", the die have been cast. Programs have been funded. Conracts signed. Bases built. Things set in motion. And who will be in a position to really know the depth and breadth of what is going on? And Joseph, have you read the Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby? The CIA and the Vatican had the backs of the surviving Nazis. (Oglesby doesn't mention the Vatican but he tells the tale of Gehlen). 'Splains alot about "de-Nazficatio".
Oh, I've read that book more than once and even talked with Oglesby, whose own politics have veered kinda rightward since then. The Yankee-Cowboy theory is one of those things I actually made a conscious attempt to shake off. No disrespect meant to Oglesby's work, which was and is quite valuable. But the theory became such a habitual way for me to look at political reality that I almost forgot that there were other ways. Besides, my friends were starting to let me know that if I ever brought up "that fucking book" again they were going to make me eat it.
The theory requires updating. How do the neocons fit in? We associate them with Bush, the apostle of all the Cowboy virtues. (The Jesus thing is very Cowboy.) But the neocons have strong European ties, which is one of the key Yankee attributes.
In times past, the presidential ticket indicated a Yankee/Cowboy split (think Kennedy/Johnson or Carter/Mondale) -- but what about Clinton/Gore or Bush/Cheney?
We need a new theory.
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