“All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
As my vacation winds down tonight, what more appropriate way to say goodbye to carefree relaxation for another year than to reflect on what would turn out to be the most costly, most ill-timed and catastrophic vacation in American politics (until 2005)?
It had come out a year ago when Ron Suskind had published his landmark book, The One Percent Doctrine, that when Bush was vacationing in Crawford, Texas in August of 2001, the CIA had sent him a memo entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US.” After having phoned it in, we can only surmise the reaction, or lack thereof, that necessitated a face to face meeting with someone whom, after barely more than six months on the job, people were already beginning to view as a failed president. According to Suskind’s source, when Bush had gotten the personal briefing from panicky CIA analysts, the nonplussed Chief Executive was quoted as saying, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
As if doing one’s part to apprise the President of the United States of an impending attack on a massive scale by a major terrorist organization is a mere middle management affair motivated by nothing more than a desire to cover one’s ass.
That, as we all now know, took place on August 6th, 2001, six years ago today.
Ripley at Zencabin, as I’d previously said, thought enough of me to email me recently to contribute to his/her blogswarm on August 6th. With catching up on backed-up email and the news, the bridge in Minnesota collapsing, Congress caving in to Bush’s bullying over the FISA renewal and otherwise settling back in after my vacation in the Berkshires, I felt obligated as a liberal blogger to add my tiny flame to what hopefully would be a blazing torch. Yet, I didn’t have any ideas, anything new to add to a story that has been legion across the Internet for six years now.
OK, the CIA tried to warn Bush during his vacation that bin Laden wanted to hit us using our own planes and Bush didn’t think enough about the warnings to do his part over the next five weeks to stave off the attacks. We all know this. There’s no sense in beating a dead horse.
Then, thinking about it some more I thought again of how history is about more than names, dates and events. The lifeblood of history, what makes it so fascinating to people like me is what gives it its significance: Cause and Effect. Sometimes a story has to be given added context by subsequent events before we can fully appreciate its significance and impact.
What happened between Bush and Congress this past week over the FISA renewal will be a case study in political science classes for decades to come, although I imagine a growing number of poli sci students will be asking themselves, “What in God’s name were the Democrats thinking when they caved in to this lunatic?” Indeed, given how toxic Bush has proved to be for his own party, the same students may even be so bold as to ask what the Republicans were thinking when they sought to make legal what for six years had been illegal.
But the sheer unmitigated gall of George Bush preemptively charging Democrats with caring more about their vacation than national security just adds an extra dimension and hardly any more luster to the story that began six years ago of a so-called President who did just that then somehow, with an inexplicable, evil political agility that had to be engineered by Satan himself, turned America’s darkest day into his brightest, shiniest hour of triumph.
It’s been said for years many times, in many ways by better writers and thinkers than me that September 11th, 2001 was our Gulf of Tonkin, the attack for which bottled spiders like William Kristol in PNAC were quivering with anticipation like a 15 year-old in his first whorehouse. It provided us with our whole rationale for invading Iraq because not nearly enough people in Congress, on the street or in the fourth estate bothered to ask what possible connection that Saddam Hussein had to either 9/11 or al Qaida.
When the final chapter of this administration is written thousands of years from now, when everything that we spent hundreds of thousands of hours every month writing will be dissolved into an undecipherable electronic soup, it will be said that George Bush’s seeming incuriousness regarding that August 6th, 2001 presidential daily briefing, presented to him by the same agency that had armed Osama bin Laden under Reagan of whom they were then warning him, was merely mirroring our own incuriousness.
Because after September 11th, when George W. Bush’s own popularity had soared to stratospheric heights, asking sweaty uncomfortable questions such as, “What does Iraq have to do with 9/11 and al Qaida?” were then deemed to be unpatriotic, subversive and even professionally suicidal (Phil Donahue can tell you all about that).
But the plain fact remains that while Bush’s interest in Osama bin Laden continually flags and is only revived once every couple of years when a new video comes out, his interest in indefinitely occupying Iraq and getting his grubby hands on those oil deposits has never waned. He’s never taken his eyes off the prize and still insists that Saddam’s past threat to his people (once again, enabled by Ronald Reagan) alone justifies an eternal presence that thus far has killed going on 3700 US troops and close to a million Iraqis, if human rights organizations' estimates are reasonably accurate.
And it’s all but been admitted by George Bush himself that it’s all about the oil. In the summer of 2005, he told us if we don’t get our hands that that sweet, sweet light crude from Iraq’s oil fields, well, the terrorists will get it. But terrorists aren’t interested in grabbing oil. They’re not in the oil business. George Bush and Dick Cheney were (are?). Their interest in anyone’s oil is to sabotage their pipelines (as with al Qaida’s attempts in Saudi Arabia of late) and cause economic upheaval.
Bush’s seeming lack of interest in the August 6th, 2001 PDB may have had a rationale behind it. Perhaps he, like PNAC, was waiting for another Pearl Harbor, waiting for his own Gulf of Tonkin and the political invulnerability that his closest aides told him he’d inherit as a result. And it can’t be mere coincidence or an act of innocent incompetence that the only people who have benefited from Iraq’s invasion and occupation are the oil cartels and oil services giants such as his Vice President’s former company Halliburton and KBR. Them and at one point over 400 private contractors working in Iraq. Private security, it came out in Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, in their heyday, gobbled up about a third of Iraq’s reconstruction budget, which helped condemn 25,000,000 baffled and furious people to live without hospitals, schools, in poverty, in the dark and near open sewers.
If nothing else, the best thing that George W. Bush can give the United States is not an upper hand in the war on terror, not economic prosperity, not a strengthening transportation or military infrastructure but an ongoing object lesson in the fatal consequence of incuriousness, in not questioning authority regardless of the might of its political capital, in defiance of the zeitgeist.
Let Bush be a lesson of the perilous folly of timorousness and incuriousness, and the value of speaking truth to power. Or, if bankrupt of the truth as we were in early 2003, to wring the truth from it.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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