| Bernard Weiner |(EVERGLADES CITY, FL.) For the past four years, as I've been criss-crossing America -- and even when traveling abroad in Asia, Africa and Europe -- I have run into the same pattern: Conservative, Reagan-style Republicans, many of them serving or former military types, ranting about the Bush Administration and the incalcuable damage done both to the Constitution and to the U.S. reputation in the world.
In all these conversations, these angry screeds just burst out of these conservatives, without any pre-knowledge that the fellow they're talking with is an editor of an anti-Bush, pro-democracy website.
When they find out my political slant, they seem overjoyed that they've met someone who shares many, though clearly not all, of their anxieties about the wrong direction in which the country is being taken. They need to vent their anger and disappointment big time; they can't do so in front of many of their military superiors and fellow officers.
So they're happy to have someone to talk with who listens to their rants and agrees with much of them. And me? Much to my surprise, I find myself supporting military leaders inside the Bush Administration, since they are serving as a brake on even worse policies. And they are the country's most prolific leakers in opposition to those CheneyBush policies.
I'm in Florida for my uncle's 85th birthday celebration in a wealthy, white household in South Florida and one of the extended-family members, an active-duty official in one of the armed forces, volunteers that "the Cheney Administration," as he puts it, has wrecked the standing of America abroad by its obsessive pre-occupation with launching and then continuing long past the point of no-return this ill-advised Iraq War.
ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE RANT AGAINST BUSHThis former Reagan staffer, of course, believes that if the U.S. had gone into Iraq with "a half-million men, and taken care of business," America would not be trapped in the quagmire it's in today. But he also believes that you can't fight extremist Muslim terrorists militarily since "you can never win" that kind of guerrilla war.
The war we should be fighting and winning, he said during his 30-minute rant, is for the hearts and minds of the locals, and CheneyBush policies are not capable of succeeding in that type of battle, especially given the use of torture as approved state policy, the not uncommon rapes and murders of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, the corruption everywhere that accompanies the U.S. occupation, the continuing lack of infrastructure development (electricity, fresh water,) etc. .
Later in the evening, my sister and I engage the military man again on a seeming contradiction: You stated, we say to him, that the U.S. can't emerge victorious in these wars against nationalist guerrillas but you think we should have thrown 500,000 troops into the battle anyway, a battle you say we can't win against the forces of Islamic nationalism?
In an argument I've heard before from other military types, he didn't see his position as containing a contradiction: "If we had moved that half-million in there in force and kicked ass immediately, stopped the looting, secured the ammo dumps, made it more difficult to come across the porous borders, installed our Iraqi strongman in charge -- if we had done all that then, chances are pretty good things would have turned out much differently and to our advantage now."
"But since the Cheney Administration, mainly Cheney and Rumsfeld, messed up the situation royally from the git-go, there's no way we can put Humpty Dumpty together again, achieve anything approximating a victory. It's simply time for us to go, before we make the situation even worse. Better to simply get out of there with as much of our tattered reputation as we can take with us, rather than flail about for a year or two before having to exit even more hastily in humiliating Vietnam-War fashion."
DEMOCRATIC MOVES ON THE IRAQ WARThat argument (shared by so many traditional conservatives who abandoned the GOP in November 2006) seems to animate many Democrats in the House and Senate, willing to take the political risk by attaching strict conditions to war-funding bills, as a way of crippling CheneyBush's ability to wage its aggressive war-of-choice and to build momentum for ending the U.S. war as soon as is practicable. Sure, the Dems' moves are a kind of attack-from-the-side approach, rather than opposing CheneyBush policies frontally, and, for the moment, leave U.S. troops on the ground there for another year.
But even with these serious objections, more power to the Dems, since the normal arguments -- and the GOP's overwhelming defeat in the November 2006 election and the growing majority of Americans of all stripes in the polls to get the troops out -- doesn't faze the Administration's determination to "stay the course." That phrase must be understood to mean: "take the country over the cliff with them as things go from worst to worster in Iraq."
So if it takes small, incremental but significant steps to start the exit-Iraq ball rolling, then let's take them -- as long as we continue the effort with more meaningful withdrawal and de-funding bills as the days go on (along with a bill announcing there will be no financial support for Bush's pending war against Iran). Passing resolutions devoid of legal teeth in them doesn't help all that much in getting the U.S. troops, and innocent Iraqi civilians, out of harm's way. Passing bills that fund the troops' withdrawal, in concert with supporting U.N. and regional stabilizing efforts, can draw the day closer when the U.S. military machine can start rolling out of there, five years into a catastrophic war.
LBERTO GONZALES, BUSH TOADYSo how does Alberto ("Abu") Gonzales, he of the headline above, come into the Iraq picture?
For one thing, to figure out how to stop the war, first you have to know the key players who took the U.S. into the war and a bungled Occupation. My advice is to look for those with their fingers in a whole lot of policy and operational pies. In the current CheneyBush Administration, that translates to Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bush Hisself, Alberto Gonzales, Stephen Hadley, and the ineffectual Bush lapdog Condoleezza Rice. (Previous co-conspirators: Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Steven Cambone, Doug Feith, and John Ashcroft have already left the scene of the crime.)
Those departures and the coming resignations demonstrate clearly that what we're witnesssing in these waning days of the CheneyBush Administration is an implosion of the once-monolithic inner circle, and the rest of the remaining crew hunkering further down in the White House bunker, trying desperately to avoid both the stain of history and to stay out of the federal slammer as a result of their crimes and corruptions. (See "
Bush Heads for the Bunker.")
Attorney General Gonzales, who from his earliest association with Bush in Texas, has been his personal legal toady, has demonstrated time and again his willingness to do whatever needs to be done to keep his protector in power. Rove and Gonzales and Harriet Miers, key figures in Bush's so-called Texas Mafia, represent the elite powers-that-be that are the political bookends propping up this shady enterprise.
And now Gonzales, caught knee-deep in the U.S. Attorneys scandal, looks as if he's a political liability and will be thrown overboard in short order. His key aide, Kyle Sampson, was the designated scapegoat, but his resignation couldn't stanch the bleeding in this ever-widening scandal, and Gonzales' lies and probable perjury before U.S. Senate committees require something more drastic, such as his firing or resignation.
GONZO'S LARGER CRIMESAs if often the case, the real crimes go uncharged and the thing that brings down the kingpin is a lesser scandal. In the 1930s, for example, Al Capone, the master mob boss, was imprisoned for non-payment of taxes rather than for the numerous murders and mayhem he engineered. In the case of Gonzales, he'll go down for covering-up his political maneuvering to fire competent, dedicated U.S. Attorneys and install Bush loyalists in their stead. (Similarly, Libby was convicted not for outing a covert CIA operative but for perjury about his role.)
Gonzales is the one figure most responsible for creating a legal philosophy in support of Bush's authoritarian rule (the president is permitted to violate the Constitution and laws passed by Congress whenever he is acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime"), and for justifying torture and other severe violations of Americans' civil liberties (the "war on terrorism" trumps all constitutional protections). But Gonzales will not be removed from office for those gross crimes, but because he couldn't cover his tracks well enough in internal White House emails and lied in his attempt to escape culpability.
It does the heart good to see the shrinking Bush Bunker crew start to run out of lower-level scapegoats (Libby the fall guy for Cheney, Rumsfeld the sacrificial lamb for continuing the Iraq war policy, Sampson for Gonzales, et al.). That means that the genuine villains, those in control of policy, are now, finally, having to face the music.
When Gonzo goes, that should mean that the progenitors of CheneyBush policy (those two, plus Rove, Rice and Hadley) will be left even more exposed and thus the primary targets of congressional investigations -- and, in the case of Bush and Cheney, impeachment proceedings.
Cheney and Rove should be first to go, Cheney running the world, Rove running Bushworld politics. As Patrick Fitzgerald's Libby trial showed, Cheney is at the heart of virtually every bad decision in the Administration, running virtually a shadow government and foreign policy. Rove likewise on the domestic front. Their fingerprints are all over the joint, and bulldog investigations should reveal the extent of their perfidy.
Let's get on with it.
-- BW
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