http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/postelection.html
A Post-Election Wrap-Up: Iraq, 9/11, Drugs, Cheney, and Watergate Two by Peter Dale Scott 27 November 2004
Possible Issues for Indictment 9/11 as an Issue for Impeachment The FBI's Suppression of Yousef's 1994 Plane Hijacking Plot (Bojinka Two) The 9/11 Commission's Prolongation of Earlier Cover-Ups What Happened on September 11, 2001? The Challenge of Watergate Two Footnotes
I find myself accepting the re-election (or re-selection) of George Bush more calmly than most of my friends. Our sadness these days should be less for the presidency, and more for the war.
For the next few weeks many people's eyes will be focused on obtaining an accurate vote count in Ohio and other close states. But beyond the efforts to fix a broken electoral system there must also be a strategy to heal America's deep divisions as a society, if we are ever to see democracy work. To defeat the divisive electoral tactics of a Karl Rove, we must find issues which can bring right and left together to correct the excesses of a bureaucratic center. I shall argue that the quest for truth about 9/11 is such an issue. I believe further that it stands a better chance than vote recounts of shortening George Bush's occupancy of the White House.
There are also good reasons for thinking that Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq, although almost certain to be very bloody in the immediate short run, might through its own ideological arrogance and incompetence lead, one way or another, to a quicker exit from that suffering country than we would have seen with a President Kerry.
And if short-term casualty rates on all sides rise in Iraq, as they surely will, this may cause some of the right-wing voters for Bush to have second thoughts. To quote from my Salon article,
according to the available polls, 98 percent of the Iraqis want the Americans to leave. Meanwhile a poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that more than two-thirds of both the U.S. public and U.S. leaders agree that the United States should withdraw from Iraq if a clear majority of Iraqi people want it to do so.
If Bush ignores these sentiments, at least it will not be the Democrats who have to pay the electoral price for an unnecessary and immoral war.
It is tempting to think that the most urgent priority is a tactical one: to protest the slaughter in Fallujah and other Iraqi hot points. But beyond the battle of Fallujah one has to think how to contest the neocons who are intent on extending what they call "World War IV" beyond the borders of Iraq. One of them, Frank Gaffney, has in the National Review Online (11/5/04) renewed their call for the US to proceed (after "the reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens . . . in Iraq") to "Regime change -- one way or another -- in Iran and North Korea."
Such irresponsible language is offered I believe in part as a provocation, not just to persuade the White House to plan new invasions but also to dissuade Iran and Syria from helping to bring peace to the Middle East. For as the Financial Times sensibly observed,
Both Syria and Iran fear the US is determined to bring down their own regimes when its hands are free from Iraq. So co-operation on Iraq may not be sustainable without a broader and friendlier dialogue between these two governments and Washington. [1]
Gaffney is speaking for a neocon fraction, hitherto unsuccessful, inside the Bush tent. As Newsweek reported last September,
administration hawks are pinning their hopes on regime change in Tehran -- by covert means, preferably, but by force of arms if necessary. . . . Informed sources say the memos echo the administration's abortive Iraq strategy: oust the existing regime, swiftly install a pro-U.S. government in its place (extracting the new regime's promise to renounce any nuclear ambitions) and get out. This daredevil scheme horrifies U.S. military leaders. . . . [2]
The current mood on the right is that they can now go far beyond the political boundaries previously imposed. My hope is precisely that the President's triumphalism, newly liberated from thoughts of re-election, will lead to his own downfall in less than four years. It is interesting that Karl Rove, even while sounding himself somewhat triumphant, recently saw fit to warn on TV that "Those that the gods destroy they first make prideful." [3] (I doubt that Greek wisdom will have much impact on Bush's God-driven certainties.)
Two years ago, op-eds in the U.S. press began to talk of Bush's "Imperial Presidency." They were seeing the analogies between the Bush and Nixon administrations, without (apparently) thinking about Nixon's downfall. Optimists like myself began to predict to friends that Bush, even if re-elected, would also not last out his full eight years.
This was before startling leaks out of Washington, notably Chalabigate and the outing of Valerie Plame, led people to start talking more seriously of a Second Watergate. There has since been a lot of more recent evidence of a serious split between the CIA and the White House. See for example "Longtime CIA official laments surging battle with White House," (New York Times, 10/2/04). [4] The last such major confrontation ended with the President's resignation.
Day by day the White House-CIA confrontation under Bush looks more and more like that under Nixon. In the confidence of his electoral victory to a second term Nixon first fired the incumbent CIA Director (Helms) and then installed a new DCI (Schlesinger) whose avowed purpose was to shake up the CIA and fire a great number of its officers. Under Bush the incumbent DCI Tenet has "resigned" (almost certainly he was fired), and his replacement, Porter Goss has promised a similar shake-up. (As David Wise has reported of "an astounding internal memo slipped to the press last week, Porter J. Goss, the new head of the CIA, expects his spies to `support the administration'".) [5]
Already a number of senior CIA officers have "resigned," and it is clear that the agency itself feels that it is under attack. In the words of Vince Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism chief, "It is very fair to say there is tremendous turmoil in the middle ranks of the clandestine service." [6] Pointing to "Powell's sack and Rice's promotion," Sidney Blumenthal predicts that "his fall and her rise signal the purge of the CIA and the State Department -- a neoconservative night of the long knives." [7]