|
Live
From An Undisclosed Location Near You
July
16, 2003
By Weldon Berger
 Suppose
for a moment that you're a fellow with three heart attacks
under your belt and a burning desire to reorder the world.
Would you be willing to bend a few rules to realize your vision
before whatever time remaining on your meter expires?
Dick Cheney's name has been conspicuously absent during
the orgy of fingerpointing that climaxed in CIA Director George
Tenet's peculiar mea culpa regarding the Iraq-Africa-uranium
reference in this year's State of the Union speech. Among
the possible explanations for this are that 1) no one can
find him to ask him about it, or 2) he had nothing to do with
it, or 3) he's smarter than everyone else involved.
Given that the current flap was created by former ambassador
Joseph Wilson (first named publicly here
at Democratic Underground) with his New York Times
revelation that his investigation into the Iraq-Niger allegations
was prompted by Cheney's office, and given that the circular
firing squad now surrounding the White House seems to be grazing
everyone but Cheney, option three looks good.
A quick review: Cheney, along with Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter
Libby, is the prime architect of the sea change in U.S. foreign
and defense policy that includes the doctrine of preventive
war and the deliberate marginalization of international institutions
such as the UN and, ultimately, NATO, in favor of extemporaneous
temporary alliances constructed and dissolved around particular
crises.
Wolfowitz and Libby were the principal authors of the 1992
Defense
Policy Guidance , created for and heavily influenced by
then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in which the principal
points of our current policies were first delineated. The
New York Times and Washington Post obtained
drafts of the document - from which the most controversial
passages were excised after howls of protest from Congress
and various Bush I administration officials - and excerpted
portions of it, including this one:
The central strategy of the Pentagon framework
is to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently
for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage
them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time
maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role."
The new order would include
... "a unilateral U.S. defense guarantee" to
Eastern Europe, "preferably in cooperation with other NATO
states," and contemplates use of American military power to
preempt or punish use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons,
"even in conflicts that otherwise do not directly engage U.S.
interests."
Amazingly, Cheney managed to receive credit for moderating the
document's tone after playing a major role in the original,
more belligerent version.
Cheney left government with Bush I, but, in between heart
attacks and running Halliburton, he kept his eye on the strategic
ball. In 1998, along with Donald Rumsfeld and others, he co-founded
the Project for a New American Century , a think tank
and home for unemployed neconservatives such as Wolfowitz,
Libby and other current Bush administration figures; a group
that has long seen a friendly Iraq as the ideal platform from
which to project American power in the Middle East. PNAC's
flagship document is Rebuilding America's Defenses,
a report issued in September of 2000 which echoes and elaborates
upon the themes first introduced in the ill-fated 1992 Defense
Policy Guidance draft.
Among the more widely quoted paragraphs in that document
is this one, which drove conspiracy theorists into a frenzy:
Further, the process of transformation [in
military and foreign policy affairs], even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic
and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.
Adding fuel to the fire was this excerpt:
In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of
American forces, along with British and French units, has
become a semipermanent fact of life. Though the immediate
mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over
northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment
of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital
importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought
to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security.
While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence
in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This is all available at the PNAC website.
One of the things about Cheney upon which everyone who has
spent any time with him agrees is that he's smart; really,
really smart. Many people were surprised when he turned up
as the personnel screener for George Bush during the 2000
campaign, and even more surprised when Bush chose him as his
running mate. One is compelled to think that Cheney saw in
the empty vessel that was Candidate Bush his last, golden
opportunity to change the world, and he jumped at it. He packed
the administration with PNAC alumni and other neoconservatives;
he hired Don Rumsfeld, who shares his vision of a transformed
military and a muscular, uninhibited foreign policy, as Secretary
of Defense; he elevated Condoleezza Rice - as an academic
a staunch advocate of toppling Hussein - to the post in which
foreign policy and intelligence agencies intersect; and, of
course, he placed himself within the inner circle of advisors
to Bush.
During the runup to the war (from August 2002 forward) Cheney
and Rice were the two administration figures most intent on
portraying Iraq as a nuclear threat. It was Rice who came
up with the memorable "mushroom cloud" line about the foolhardiness
of waiting on the regime to consumate its nuclear program,
and it was Cheney who, on the eve of the war, told Meet the
Press host Tim Russert that "We believe he (Saddam)
has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Of all the figures most publicly involved in promoting the
war, it was Rice and Cheney who were most likely to know that
the evidence of a reinvigorated Iraqi nuclear program was
at best, sketchy: Cheney because of his role in sending Wilson
to Niger and his frequent visits to the CIA during the past
year, and Rice because of her position as coordinator of the
various intelligence agencies. Exalted though that position
is, Rice is unlikely to have made on her own the decision
to push a spurious Iraqi nuclear threat. Yet we now know she
did push it, at least with respect to the Iraq-Niger issue,
because administration officials acknowledged over the July
12 weekend that Tenet had told Rice's deputy director as far
back as October, 2002, of the agency's concerns about the
allegation. Rice, however, during her own June 8 Meet
the Press appearance, was still insisting that
no one in the upper reaches of the White House had been aware
of doubts about the allegations:
"The president quoted a British paper. We did
not know at the time - no one knew at the time, in our circles
- maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but
no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions
that this might be a forgery."
Either she's lying or she's providing a startling insight into
where the administration keeps George Tenet when they're not
trotting him out to take one in the neck for the White House,
or, more likely, both.
So who maneuvered Rice into this position? The only two
people who could have done are Bush and Cheney, and of the
two only Cheney, to whom the installation of a friendly regime
in Iraq is a critical step in the transformation of the world
into a more orderly and U.S.-centric place, was really in
a position to do so.
The beauty of the situation is that for Cheney, there's
no downside. He may well emerge from all this unscathed, and
the worst that could happen is that he might lose Rice or
be forced to resign himself, leaving behind an administration
still packed with like-minded folks. In the extremely unlikely
event that Bush were to be forced from office because of this
or another scandal, well, Cheney would miss him a good deal
less than he would miss Cheney.
Smart people have their limitations - Iraq has to this point
not been the tidy triumph expected by the Rumpercheneywitz
clan, which is probably the only reason anyone is paying attention
to what I like to call "Hallucinogate" - and there's always
the possibility that the combination of a poor economy and
growing doubts about the Bush national security agenda will
usher in another Democratic administration.
Even that prospect, though, can't be too daunting. Much
of what the Bush administration has done can't be undone.
We're in Iraq, and our only hope of escaping relatively unscathed
is to lift it from its miserable present and leave it shinier
than we found it. That will require years during which our
military presence in the Middle East will be as sturdy as
the neoconservatives think appropriate. Because of that and
our other military commitments, the defense budget is destined
to head steeply upward during the foreseeable future, another
neoconservative goal.
So, for a guy running on borrowed time, Cheney has done
himself quite proud. And if he had to bend or break a few
rules along the way, I doubt he's losing any sleep over it.
That's a job for the rest of us.
Weldon Berger is a freelance writer living and working in
Hawaii, which is, he hopes, as far from Dick Cheney's undisclosed
location as one can get while still residing in the United
States. His home is guarded by multiple microwave ovens. He
can be reached by email at: weldon.berger@ziplip.com
|
