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Now
George W. Bush, who proudly claimed
the mantle of "war president," was keenly rebuked in
the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely
continued the surreal politics of premeditated war"a politics
that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our
nation's history.
Two elements of the repudiation
seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length
of its gestation period--those six years--and how tepid it was.
Given the documented record of the Bush Administration"lying
us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid
contracts, spying secretly on the nation's citizens, selling
public policy to Jack Abramoff's clients, stating even their
intent to ignore laws with dozens of "signing statements"--one
would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner,
and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress
(and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en
masse two years ago.
The victorious Democrats' response
was even more surprising, and also unreal. "Impeachment
is off the table" quickly became the mantra: let us instead
proceed with raising the minimum wage. Apparently the Bush Administration's
record is flawless, showing nothing remotely approaching a high
crime or a misdemeanor. Impeachment would be a "waste of
time."
There is a good reason for
these strange results: we practice a politics of surrealism,
and have done so since George Bush was first put in office.
Ron Suskind of the New York
Times learned how the Bush Administration works, from a "senior
advisor to Bush" (Karl Rove is a suspect): "We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
They have done that, incessantly, and it is the source of the
surrealism. Spins, evasions, omissions, jingoisms, distortions,
"perception management" (i.e., propaganda), and deliberate
lying all contribute to a political discourse adrift from what
is honest, true, and reliable.
The Clear Skies Act allowed
more pollution, the Healthy Forests Act caused more trees to
be cut down, the Patriot Act scarred the Bill of Rights, No Child
Left Behind was a step toward privatizing public education, the
Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act
was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry and began the process
of dismantling Medicare, the Military Commissions Act fostered
torture and suspended habeas corpus.
But no such manufactured reality
is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the "global
war on terror."
It took six years for a tardy
and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because
the trusting American people believed the "war on terror"
was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal
terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was
prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as
necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually
that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.
The recent electoral turnaround
was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today,
the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered
by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded
public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose,
went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism
has been so successful.
We need to strip away the created
reality of the "war on terror" to see the true nature
of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.
The wars in both Afghanistan
and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations
to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn't
possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated"conceived,
planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.
(Yes, there have been premeditated
military incursions in the past"Panama, Grenada, and Kosovo
come to mind"but none was of the magnitude and duration
of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. Never before have we unleashed
full scale combat, unprovoked, on sovereign foreign nations and
then installed permanent military bases to occupy them.)
Though it has not been addressed
in the mass media, the factual story of the President's premeditated
wars is clearly visible, and when the story is read at one sitting,
the dreamlike quality of our politics is apparent.
The story to follow will not
be a great revelation to anyone who has read, perhaps a bit more
than casually, about our recent political, military, and diplomatic
past, and has spent some time searching the Internet for corroboration
and details. On the other hand, it is far from common knowledge,
because in the manufactured reality crafted by the Bush Administration,
it does not exist.
Two strands of history converged
in the Bush years. One led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the
other to the invasion of Iraq, and the strands came together
on September 11, 2001.
The opening chapter of the
story reveals a photograph dating to the Reagan years of Donald
Rumsfeld cordially shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We supported
Saddam in his war with Iran. But history convulses: on January
26, 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld and 17 others, members of the Project
for a New American Century, wrote a letter to President Clinton,
urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. If
we fail to do so, they were candid in asserting, "a significant
portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."
This could be considered the
fountainhead of our surreal politics. The PNAC proposed premeditated
war explicitly, in a bizarre retrogression to the centuries of
unapologetic European imperialism. Since World War II and the
birth of the United Nations, however, the world has been seeking
to surpass imperialism, struggling to settle international difficulties
peaceably"and here was an open, sad, and radical rebuff.
(In addition to Mr. Rumsfeld,
10 others of the signatories would serve in the Bush Administration:
Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky,
Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, William Schneider,
Jr., Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz.)
When George W. Bush took office,
a concern for the "significant portion of the world's oil
supply" was never far from view, because the Administration's
personal linkages to the oil industry were intimate, historic,
and numerous. The president and vice president were just the
first examples: eight cabinet secretaries and the national security
advisor were recruited directly from the oil industry, and so
were 32 others in the secretariats of Defense, State, Energy,
Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
The Bush Administration came
to power anxious, we know from published sources, to fulfill
the PNAC's vision of regime change in Iraq.
In his second week in office,
President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National
Energy Policy Development Group. The supersecret "Energy
Task Force," as it came to known, was composed of officials
from the relevant federal agencies and beyond question heavily
attended by energy industry executives and lobbyists. (The full
membership has yet to be revealed, but Enron's Kenneth Lay was
conspicuously present.)
One brute fact had to be apparent
to the Task Force: in the Caspian Basin, and beneath the Iraqi
deserts there are 125 billion barrels of proven oil reserves,
and the potential for 433 billion barrels more. Anyone controlling
that much oil could break OPEC's stranglehold overnight.
By early March, 2001, the Task
Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines,
tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory
of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts""dozens
of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages
of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were
forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial
Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn't
easy--the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way
to the Supreme Court--but the maps and documents can now be seen
and downloaded.)
Not a single U.S. oil company,
however, was among the "suitors," and that was intolerable.
Mr. Cheney's task force concluded, "By any estimation, Middle
East oil producers will remain central to world security. The
Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."
Condoleezza Rice's National
Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo
to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered
melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The NSC
was ordered to support "the review of operational policies
towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture
of new and existing oil and gas fields."
The Bush Administration seemed
clearly to be drawing a bead on Iraqi oil"long before the
"global war on terror" was envisioned and marketed.
But how could the "capture of new and existing oil fields"
be made to seem less aggressive, less baldly in violation of
international law?
At the State Department, a
policy-development initiative called "The Future of Iraq"
was undertaken which would accomplish this. The date was April,
2002, almost a full year before the invasion. The "Oil and
Energy Working Group" provided the cover. Iraq, it said
in its final report:, "should be opened to international
oil companies as quickly as possible after the warthe country
should establish a conducive business environment to attract
investment in oil and gas resources."
"Capture" would take
the form of "investment," and the vehicle for doing
so would be the "production sharing agreement." In
exchange for investing in development costs, oil companies would
"share" in the subsequent production. What would happen,
though, if the companies' investments were only minimal, but
their shares of the production were disproportionately, obscenely
large?
That's the way it will work
out. Production sharing agreements (PSA's) are in place covering
75% of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, soon
to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162% on their "investments."
The "foreign suitors" are not quite so foreign now:
the players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips,
BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSA's, instead of
alternative methods of financing infrastructure, however, will
cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just
the first few years of the "investment" program.
PSA's are favored by the oil
companies because the term "production sharing agreement"
is a euphemism for legalized theft. PSA's were not adopted voluntarily
by the Iraqis, however: their use was specified by the U.S. State
Department and institutionalized by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority.
So a line of dots begins to
point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has
yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage,
but two "seemingly unrelated areas of policy""national
security policy and international energy policy"have become
indistinguishable.
Another line of dots begins
with the Carter Administration encouraging and arming the Taliban
and Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan, to fend off the Russian
invasion there.
And so the next chapter in
the story of George Bush's wars is underway.
The strategic location of Afghanistan
can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16
trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct
pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.
After the fall of the Soviet
Union, the first western oil company to express interest and
take action in the Basin was the Bridas Corporation of Argentina.
It acquired production leases and exploration contracts in the
region, and by November of 1997 had signed an agreement with
General Dostum of the Northern Alliance and with the Taliban
to build a pipeline across Afghanistan.
Not to be outdone, the American
company Unocal fought Bridas at every turn, even spurning an
invitation from Bridas to join an international consortium in
the Basin. Unocal wanted exclusive control of the trans-Afghan
pipeline, and hired a number of consultants in its conflict with
Bridas: Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage (now Deputy Secretary
of State in the Bush Administration), Zalmay Khalilzad (a signer
of the PNAC letter to President Clinton) and Hamid Karzai. (Eventually
Bridas sued Unocal in the U.S. courts, and won.)
Unocal stayed on the attack
until 1999, frequently wooing Taliban leaders at its headquarters
in Texas, and hosting them in meetings with federal officials
in Washington, D.C.
Unocal and the Clinton Administration
hoped to have the Taliban cancel the Bridas contract, but were
getting nowhere. Mr. John J. Maresca, a Unocal Vice President,
testified to a House Committee of International Relations on
February 12, 1998, asking politely to have the Taliban removed
and a stable government inserted. His discomfort was well placed.
Six months later terrorists
linked to Osama bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, and two weeks after that President Clinton launched
a cruise missile attack into Afghanistan. Clinton issued an executive
order on July 4, 1999, freezing the US held assets and prohibiting
further trade transactions with the Taliban.
Mr. Maresca could count that
as progress. More would follow.
Immediately on taking office,
the new Bush Administration actively took up negotiating with
the Taliban once more, seeking still to have the Bridas contract
vacated in favor of Unocal. The parties met three times, in Washington,
Berlin, and Islamablad, but the Taliban wouldn't budge.
Behind the negotiations, however,
planning was underway to take military action against the Taliban.
The State Department sought and gained concurrence from both
India and Pakistan to do so, and in July of 2001 three American
officials met with Pakistani and Russian intelligence people
to inform them of planned military strikes against Afghanistan
the following October.
State Department official Christina
Rocca told the Taliban, at their last pipeline negotiation in
August of 2001, just five weeks before 9/11, "Accept our
offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."
Common to both the Afghan and
Iraqi lines of dots are energy resources, both oil and gas. It
is true our country depends on oil and gas, but it is not the
American people who need to corner Mid East oil and gas by force.
Dozens of oil companies around the world"the "foreign
suitors," for example"can supply us with Iraqi oil
or Caspian Basin gas, and would be pleased to do so. There is
no reason not to rely on them: we are buying more and more Toyotas
and Volvos, and fewer Chevrolets and Fords, with no apparent
damage to our national security. Why not do the same with gasoline,
diesel, and LNG, and avoid armed conflict?
Why not? Because the bottom
lines of Exxon-Mobil, Unocal and other domestic oil companies,
in the eyes of the Bush Administration, are sacrosanct. It is
not the American consumers, then, but only the American oil companies
who benefit from George Bush's premeditated wars.
Also common to both lines of
dots, and integral to the overall story, is the historic, intimate,
and profitable relationship across several generations between
the Bush family and the royal family of Saudi Arabia. It can
be seen today in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based investment
company focused primarily in the arms, security, and energy industries.
Both George H.W. and George W. Bush have been deeply involved
in Carlyle, and so have a number of the Saudi royalty. (And so,
incidentally, has the family of Osama Bin Laden.)
Carlyle has profited immensely
from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. Its legal matters are handled
by Baker, Botts"James Baker's law firm in Texas. Mr. Baker
also has a personal interest in Carlyle, amounting to some $180
million. (Baker, Botts defended Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz,
the Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, who was sued by the families
of Trade Tower victims for alleged complicity in the attacks.)
Another client of Baker, Botts is Exxon-Mobil.
In September of 2000, with
the Presidential election approaching, the Project for a New
American Century published a report, "Rebuilding America's
Defenses." The PNAC once more advocated pre-emptive war,
i.e., premeditated war, something unprecedented in the U.S. history,
but it realized what a radical departure that would represent.
Moving to such a mindset would be long and difficult, in the
absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like
a new Pearl Harbor."
When President Bush assumed
office three other members of the Project for a New American
Century joined his administration: Richard Cheney, Douglas Feith,
and Lewis Libby. Pre-emptive, premeditated war was formally adopted
when the President signed the National Security Strategy early
in his tenure.
So the twists and turns, convulsions,
and complexity of people and ideas continued, and so did the
jockeying for the world's oil wealth, but still nothing illegal
or unconstitutional had been done.
The rationale, the urge, and
the planning, however, for attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq
were in place. But to attack a sovereign nation unprovoked would
enrage the American people"and much of the world, as well.
The Bush Administration bided its time.
The preparations had all been
done secretly, wholly within the executive branch. The Congress
was not informed until the endgame of the premeditation, when
President Bush, making his dishonest case for the "war on
terror" asked for and was granted the discretion to use
military force. The American people were equally denied information
of critical public importance. Probably never before in our history
was such a drastic and momentous action undertaken with so little
knowledge or oversight: the dispatch of America's armed forces
into five years of violence.
The story of George Bush's
premeditated wars now enters its final chapter.
The catastrophic event takes
place. A hijacked airliner probably en route to the White House
crashes in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon is afire, and the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center are rubble.
In the first hours of frenetic
response, fully aware of al Qaeda's culpability, both President
Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld seek frantically to link Saddam Hussein
to the attacks, we know from on site-witnesses. They are anxious
to proceed with their planned invasion. And less than a week
later, at a meeting of the National Security Council, President
Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to handle Iraq,
"possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields."
The controversies rage on yet
today about the events of September 11, 2001. No steel building
has ever collapsed from fire alone. Buildings falling precisely
into their footprints are the marks of deliberate (and expert)
demolition. The faulty construction/foreshortened lifespan/insurance
angle. The collapse of a third building that was not hit at all.
The short-selling of airline stock in previous days. The Pentagon
hit by a missile, not a civilian airliner. Michael Rupert's book
"Crossing the Rubicon" lays the blame for 9/11 directly
at Dick Cheney's feet. Senator Robert Dole's former chief of
staff, Mr. Stanley Hilton, claims he can prove George Bush signed
an order authorizing the attacks. Half the people polled in New
York city believed the Bush Administration had prior knowledge
of the attack, and "consciously failed" to act. Et
cetera.
(Conspiracy is forever easier
to see than to find, but that does not obviate the need to seek
thoroughly the whole truth about 9/11, and that has yet to be
done.)
Involving the Bush Administration
in the execution of 9/11, or even accommodating their informed
inaction, is almost too appalling to contemplate. But if they
needed a reason to proceed with their planned invasions, they
could not have been handed a more fortuitous and spectacular
excuse.
9/11 was a criminal act of
terrorism, not a violation of our entire nation's security. Comparing
it, as the Bush Administration immediately did, to Pearl Harbor
was ludicrous: the hijacked airliners were not the vanguard of
a formidable naval armada, an air force, and a standing army
ready to engage in all out war, as the Japanese were prepared
to do and did in 1941. 9/11 was a shocking event of unprecedented
scale, but to characterize it as an invasion of national security
was criminal. It was creating reality. It was also, and in the
extreme, surreal, because the Bush Administration chose consciously
to frighten the American people beyond any conceivable necessity.
It adopted fear mongering as a mode of governance.
As not a few disinterested
observers noted at the time, international criminal terrorism
is best countered by international police action, which Israel
and other nations have proven many times over to be effective.
Then why was a "war"
declared on "terrorists and states that harbor terrorists?"
The pre-planned attack on Afghanistan,
as we have seen, was meant to nullify the contract between the
Taliban and the Bridas Corporation, to assure access to the Caspian
Basin riches for American oil companies. It was a pure play of
international energy policy. It had nothing to do, as designed,
with apprehending Osama bin Laden"a pure play of security
policy.
But the two "seemingly
unrelated areas of policy" had been "melded,"
so here was an epic opportunity to bait-and-switch--and the opportunity
was not missed for a moment. Conjoining the terrorist and the
state that harbored him made a "war" plausible: it
would be necessary to overthrow the Taliban as well as to bring
Osama bin Laden to justice. (As it turned out, of course, the
Taliban was overthrown instead of bringing Osama bin Laden to
justice, but the energy policy goal was achieved, at least. And
years later President Bush was astonishing in his candor, when
he admitted "Osama bin Laden isn't important.")
The first monstrous and intentional
deception"the declaration of a "war on terror""took
place. There was no talk of contracts, pipelines, or Argentinian
oil companies. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were cleverly,
ingeniously conflated, and there was only talk of war.
On October 7, 2001 the carpet
of bombs is unleashed over Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, the former
Unocal consultant, is installed as head of an interim government.
Subsequently he is elected President of Afghanistan, and welcomes
the first U.S. envoy"Mr. John J. Maresca, Vice President
for International Relations of the Unocal Corporation, who had
implored Congress three years previously to have the Taliban
overthrown. Mr. Maresca was succeeded by Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad"also
a former Unocal consultant. (Mr. Khalilzad has since become Ambassador
to Iraq.)
With the Taliban banished and
the Bridas contract moot, Presidents Karzai of Afghanistan and
Musharraf of Pakistan meet on February 8, 2002, sign an agreement
for a new pipeline, and the way forward is open for Unocal once
more.
The Bridas contract was breached
by US military force, but behind the combat was Unocal. Bridas
sued Unocal in the US courts for contract interference, and in
2004 it won, overcoming Richard Ben Veniste's law firm. That
firm had multibillion dollar interests in the Caspian Basin,
and shared an office in Uzbekistan with the Enron Corporation.
In 2004, Mr. Ben Veniste was serving as a 9/11 Commissioner.
About a year after the Karzai/Musharraf
agreement was signed, an article appeared in "Alexander's
Gas and Oil Connections," an obscure trade publication.
It described the readiness of three US federal agencies to finance
the prospective pipeline, and how "the United States was
willing to police the pipeline infrastructure through permanent
stationing of it troops in the region." The article appeared
on February 23, 2003.
The objective of the first
premeditated war was now achieved. The Bush Administration stood
ready with financing to build the pipeline across Afghanistan,
and with a permanent military presence to protect it.
Within two months President
Bush sent the military might of America sweeping into Iraq.
The second round of deliberate
deception was more egregious by far.
Alleging a relationship between
bin Laden's al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan had at least
some basis in fact. Alleging a link between al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein simply did not. And the weapons-of-mass-destruction argument
was equally fraudulent, we know now. But the bait-and-switch
"war on terrorism" would continue. "Cakewalk."
The staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. The toppling of the
statue in Baghdad. Mission accomplished. The orchestrated capture
of Saddam Hussein. And the barrage of managed perception continues
to this day.
The smokescreen includes the
coverup of the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon.
Initially and fiercely resisting any inquiry at all, President
Bush finally appoints a 10-person "9/11 Commission."
Its report places the blame on "faulty intelligence."
President Bush and Vice President Cheney are accorded breathtaking
courtesies in the inquiry: they are not required to testify under
oath, and they need not even testify separately. At the insistence
of the White House, they are "interviewed" together
in the Oval Office, with no transcription permitted.
The apparent manipulation of
pre-war intelligence is not addressed by the 9/11 Commission,
the veracity President Bush's many statements is assumed without
question, and the troubling incongruities of 9/11 are ignored.
Many of the 10 commissioners,
however, were burdened with stunning conflicts of interest--Mr.
Ben Veniste, for example--mostly by their connections to the
oil and defense industries, both of which were benefited beyond
measure (and doubt) by the Mid East conflicts.
Then the Abu Ghraib horrors
came to the surface. Then the spectacular cronyism of the no-bid
contracts, with Mr. Cheney and his former company, Halliburton,
becoming the icons of corruption. Then the domestic spying issue.
Torrents of exposés were published, while Iraq descended
into the hellish quagmire of insurgency and civil war"with
Afghanistan belatedly following suit.
On November 7, 2006 the American
people said, "Enough!" By any measure--by public acclaim--the
last six years have been a national tragedy and a national disgrace.
In spite of the Democrats'
united message rejecting it, many citizens are calling actively
for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and perhaps others. (Secretary
Rumsfeld has left the Administration, but faces prosecution under
German law.)
The story told here has to
be considered "circumstantial." None of it results
from testimony under oath, none of it has been admitted as legal
evidence in a jurisprudential undertaking, and the presumption
of innocence until guilt is proven remains axiomatic. And we
might well reiterate the humane and civil plea, heard frequently
after 9/11: what we need is justice, not vengeance.
We should not proceed directly
to impeachment. At the very least, however, the story of George
Bush's premeditated wars raises questions of presidential dereliction
as grave as any in our history.
We need to know the truth and
all the truth. The time has come, as well as the opportunity,
for formal, Congressional investigations, based on subpoenas,
sworn testimony, and direct evidence about 9/11 and about the
created reality of the "war on terror."
The new Congress has no greater
Constitutional duty than to find this truth and display it, if
our nightmarish politics is to end. If such inquiries clearly
exonerate the Bush Administration, the nation can breathe deeply
and go on. If they do not, then but only then should impeachment
be undertaken.
To fail in this responsibility
is to condone the surreal political discourse the Bush Administration
has imposed. That could render it the permanent condition of
American governance.
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