Who Will Serve and Who Will Eat
The Tyranny of Five
War with Iraq Is Not the Problem
War in Iraq, the Conspiracy Theory
Iraq—Be Careful What You Ask
Say One Thing, Do Another
Shock and Awe
Iraq, a Dream Come True, but the Wrong Dream
Lots of Luck in Iraq
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Eternities Ago on the Tigris and Euphrates
The Everett Dirksen Billion
Two Guys Who Need to Lose a Star
Extraordinary Rendition Doesn’t Mean a Great Song in the Third Act
We Take Care of Our Own
A Hard Day for Managed News
Taking a Pass with Young Lives
Still Snake-Bit
The Civilized Mind
Notes from an Undisclosed Location
From an Undisclosed Location, a Message in a Bottle
Dissembling a Disgrace
Buddy, Can You Spare a Thousand Billion?
The Lowered-Expectations Presidency
Exit Strategies, a Lesson in Impotence
Let the Great Sacrifice Begin
A Reputation in Tatters
The Grapes of Warlord Wrath
There’s a Strong Consensus Building
Injustice Ain’t Blind, Condi
Who and Where Is Major Ben Connable?
Following Up on the Elusive Ben Connable
Major Ben Connable Checks In
The Romanian Answer to Dictators
Everybody Knows
Senior Fellows—the Cookings at Brookings
The Iraqi Concept of Time
Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints
Raising Hell, in a General Sort of Way
Angry as Hell for Not Paying Attention
The World According to Melvin Laird
Fiddling While Baghdad Burns
Major Explosions in the Middle East
You Can Tell the War in Iraq Is Winding Down
Maybe Time to Take Another Look at the Military Draft
Newt Gingrich Has Said Some Interesting Things, but This Wasn’t One of Them
Blogging from the Front and War Will Never Be the Same
Securing Baghdad Cuts Both Ways
Running Jurisprudence Through the Shredder
A Sell-Out Masquerades as Compromise
In a Rush to Make Things Worse
At What Cost Victory and How Is It Defined
Finally, a Frank Assessment from the State Department
A Made-to-Order Exit Policy in Iraq
Secrecy—a Death Blow to Oversight—a Cover for Incompetence
Relief Is Palpable in Europe
See No Opinion, Hear No Opinion, Speak No Opinion
Not on the Breakfast Menu—Humble Pie
Trying Desperately Not to Lose What Is Already Lost
Whistling Past the Grave-Yard
Published by Barkley Press
ISBN-10: 1-937674-09-6
eISBN-13: 978-1-937674-09-0
Copyright © 2010 Jim Freeman
Cover design and typesetting: Michaela Freeman
Photography credits:
Front cover Fingerprint: © Pablo631
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from the author (contact at www.jim-freeman.com), except by a
reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in the United States of America
DEDICATION
To all who question the limits of power
“I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today… the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don’t think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties… the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many… I think we got it right when the President made the decision that we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
-Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense, 1992
“We will in fact be greeted as liberators.”
-Dick Cheney as Vice-President, 2003
“The insurgency in Iraq is ‘in the last throes.’”
-Dick Cheney as Vice-President, June, 2005
Novels
EVOKE
Letters from Ceilia
The Island
Non-Fiction
Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints
The Dark Side of the Moon
(a five-book series)
The Smell of Tweed and Tobacco
Corner of My Mind
Broken Pieces
There’s been an incessant complaint on the part of the Bush administration, that the pitfalls of war in Iraq could not have been known.
That’s just plain wrong. Many of us knew, regardless of political affiliation. Ordinary citizens, Republicans, Democrats and Independents who might have kept more closely in touch with what was going on in the world outside America, but ordinary in any event. We were not privy to insider information, but were not hampered either by predilections left over from earlier, failed administrations.
George Bush was said to be haunted by his father’s failure to go all the way in the first Iraq War—Desert Storm. Joined (some say overpowered) by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in planning a response to the 9-11 attacks on America, the very highest positions of our government were given-over to paranoia and special-interest.
Paranoia in the furtive governance of a president who lacked the popular vote of his country and was seated, only as the result of a controversial and historically unprecedented decision of the Supreme Court. Paranoid in that president’s excuse to take a national disaster and, in its name, block all reasoned dissent in the mantle of national security.
It was the special-interest of Vice-President Dick Cheney to re-empower the presidency, a task he considered sacred after the presidential wreckage of Dick Nixon’s resignation. Cheney is on record as believing Vietnam could have been ‘won,’ if only the United States had not left. He has also publicly stated his dedication to the unilateral power of the office of the President, unfettered by constraint, either in Congress or the courts.
It was the special-interest of Don Rumsfeld to reorganize the American military in his vision of a small, high-tech, mobile, fighting force. Occupying troops, the famous boots on the ground, were anathema to the Secretary of Defense in his drive to downsize and modernize the Pentagon. It was also his stated policy that America would dominate space, that none others challenging the American space technology would be permitted in this new frontier.
It’s my view that these strong-minded men, along with their highly-effective and politically ruthless assistants, came to dominate a weak president, a man who was essentially disinterested, as well as tactically and philosophically in over his head.
Rushing to judgment, unwilling to listen to opposed points of view, temporarily empowered by control of both houses of Congress and seizing upon what had been delivered to them by a terrorist plot, a small cadre of powerful men, clustered around the president, essentially hijacked representative government.
The Iraq War is but one element of that hijacking, but perhaps its most public face.
This was a war and a decade with Dick Cheney’s fingerprints all over it.
–Jim Freeman
September 20, 2001 (533 days before Iraq invasion)
This morning’s New York Times carries a lead article about Bush’s appearance before a joint session of Congress and it’s really given me the blues—just when I thought we might be on the right track for an internationally supported crackdown on terrorism.
In the aftermath of the WTC and Pentagon destruction, we Americans ask ourselves what kind of national governments and religions could possibly allow terrorists to exist within their protection. Why are such things allowed? Why don’t the native populations rise up and demand an end to such inhumanities?
One needn’t look much further for the answers than within our own supposedly tolerant society and ask why we tolerate reprisals against Americans with dark skin, a turban or a beard, a style of dress that is not like our own. Taking pride as a nation of immigrants, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we mean European immigrants, white immigrants, immigrants like us.
Our own black and Hispanic populations, generations old as American citizens, are targets of racism and yes, let’s call it what it is–when a car is stopped and the occupants beaten, when gangs of whites beat, threaten or verbally attack people of color, when shopkeepers live in fear behind bullet-proof glass–terrorism.
The relatively rare occurrence of a black dragged to death, or minority shopkeepers shot for their “Difference from us” is not the point. The point is that we allow, freely allow (as is our dedicated right to be free), Nazi-Party marches through predominantly Jewish towns, the militant hate groups that have taken over certain parts of our country, the swaggering, black-booted skinheads roaming our cities in packs and a racist minority in our religions.
Recent American history is rife with example; the founding examples of slavery and the slaughter of our native population, as well as the recent examples; Asians (any Asians) being attacked in Detroit in the days when Japanese cars were kicking our car-making ass; blacks before, during and after the integration marches of the sixties; Japanese-Americans, interned during the Second World War, their properties confiscated and never returned; German-Americans, catching hell during the same times, many of them changing their names from native-German spellings; the incredible sanctioning of lives destroyed (by innuendo) during the McCarthy years.
Why did we as a nation never rise up against these anomalies?
And yet we wonder why these selfsame examples exist in other countries. And we demand extradition by reputation, without following the international laws of extradition, the proof of reasonable claim to criminal activity. That’s what the Taliban requires, no more than what we, or any nation of law, would require.
But we haven’t the patience for it. Our blood is up. The requirements of international law don’t count when our President’s approval rating is at 82% and the need to keep it there is immediate. America’s anger must be given an outlet before it directs itself against Washington for “Not doing anything.” A short-term profit, a political expediency, a mugging of justice as we have always defined justice.
I don’t like the Taliban and most Afghanis don’t either, but their country’s been taken over by these Islamic fundamentalists and they’re as powerless as Iraqi or Iranian citizens to do anything about it. I don’t like skinheads, religious leaders who condone the killing of doctors in abortion clinics, Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan either and I wish we could rid our society of such groups. But I don’t much like witch-hunts either and when the world is momentarily on our team, I weep to see us go witch-hunting.
We’re unlikely to see another time when the entire world, including for the most part the Muslim world, is desperately seeking to find a method of cooperation in rooting out terrorism. But the methods that will work, the methods that join rather than separate, are not satisfying. In our agony over the New York and Washington disasters, we demand (and understandably demand) to see something go up in flames, to see the destruction of innocents as our civilian population suffered the destruction of innocents.
It’s an understandable demand, incredibly understand-able but it’s wrong-headed and if our President were a statesman, instead of a politician, he would make us know that it’s wrong-headed. We will squander a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for a disastrous short-term satisfaction.
Our CIA sponsored terrorism in foreign countries for decades and we’ve benignly accepted that as a necessary foreign policy. Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected president of Chile, was overthrown and assassinated by a CIA-assisted coup that set up Augusto Pinochet and his mass-murders of Chilean citizens. Ask Henry Kissinger. When questioned before congress, he blandly stated that sometimes democratic elections bring the wrong man to power.
If any of twenty or thirty of fifty foreign governments that have been destabilized, in many cases totally wrecked, by these policies, demanded the immediate extradition of the Director of the CIA at the threat of armed-attack, we’d laugh in their faces. What’s different here is that no nation in today’s world has the power to make such a demand and make it credibly. The world knows this and therefore how we handle this test of our country’s patience and rule of law will forever define our glory. The very foundations of freedom and democracy will hold or crumble by our response.
Afghanistan demands proof and proof is not beyond our resources. But it will take the time and attention that would be immediately available to any grand-jury within our country, before criminal charges are brought and a suspect indicted. We owe it to ourselves to do this. We owe it to the future of a world of law to do this.
Anything less is a no more than a lynch mob and we will pay an unknown but horrific price for that mistake.
October 21, 2001 (503 days before Iraq invasion)
The recent events in New York and Washington suggest, indeed insist upon, a new paradigm in our response to world events and politics. This sea-change won’t be arrived at quickly, they never are. But it’s inevitable. The rules have changed forever.
Consider these realities:
There are no answers to this problem in the old power model, no clues to be had from the days of great opposing political forces, no key to victory in air-superiority or command of the seas. The only ultimate hope for a solution is in narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots, providing aid to people instead of governments, abandoning our own terrorist past and bringing more of the world in from the kitchen to the dining room.
Changing the dynamics of who will serve and who will eat.
Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day in a time when many struggled on five dollars a week. He under-stood that the cars pouring off his miracle assembly-lines needed more buyers than the rich could provide, that his workers needed to earn enough to own the cars they built. At that precise moment in our history, the consumer culture was born and America took off economically, continuing to this day to outdistance the world commercially. Ford changed the dynamics of who will walk and who will drive.
The world desperately needs a metaphoric five-dollar day. America needs the vision of Henry Ford to pull it off.
Let’s get it straight, that the desire to live in peace, away from want is not an American anomaly. The love and protection of family is not a strange fiction to the rest of the world. “To the victor go the spoils” has given us too proportionally a world without hope for the common man. Not the hope for a three-car garage or college for the kids, but hope for food on the table and no one to kick in the door, machine gun in hand. Believe this if you believe nothing else—the Iraqi, Afghan, Indonesian, Sudanese and Moroccan love the smell of fresh bread and the sound of their children’s laughter every bit as much as you.
The sweat-shop mills of New England and the slavery of the plantation are long gone, failed models of American productivity, a restriction rather than a broadening of middle-class values. We’ve off-shored this model to the have-not nations of the world and it’s coming back to bite us in the ankle.
The kitchen is getting ever larger and the dining room ever smaller.
Our product and profit-oriented society must realize that the scraps that fall off the table are not sufficient to sustain the model. A society that was once the envy of the world has lost its footing. We intimidate the world as we once intimidated our mill-workers.
Ford was chastised by those mill-owners, but his choice produced consumers of cars and refrigerators and theirs produced poverty, ignorance and vanished industry.
Which is the profit model? Which expands and which contracts? Where lies our future? In an ever more armed, angry and isolated world or in the proven success of Henry Ford’s insight?
Do we and will we have the wisdom, in the face of our anger and revenge, to look beyond the event to the cause?
That’s a question that will very largely shape the coming century.
September 15, 2002 (176 days before Iraq invasion)
It seems few in this nation share the administration blood-lust for war with Iraq but George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice.
The Five.
Not the Secretary of State, the Congress, the United Nations or our allies. Certainly not the generals who must win this one, if winning is even a relevant or obtainable goal. Not the public, at least not as represented in growing editorial opposition. Not even Henry Kissinger, that hawk-of-hawks, or the former Bush, Sr. presidential advisors.
And one wonders why The Five are so adamant, when any number of other Muslim or Arab countries pose the greater threat to American security.
The President tells us an Iraq war will be as easily won as Afghanistan. We have won precious little in Afghanistan. The Taliban has been hurt and dispersed, but hardly defeated and coalesces even now for a renewal of hostilities. The newly formed government dares not venture outside Kabul. What liberation, what success has been achieved? Afghanistan, if we are to prevail, will (like Bosnia) require 20 years of armed occupation and untold billions in capital improvement. The military and political conditions there are coming apart in our hands even now.
Yet The Five conspire, five people absolutely determined to take us to war in Iraq.
Well, then let them make their case to the American public.
They have not yet made their case. Despotism in Iraq is not a case. Despots abound in the Middle East. The possibility of Iraqi terrorist support is not a case, com-pared with the reality of terrorist support in Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nuclear possibility is not a case, considering nuclear reality in Pakistan. Allegations are not enough.
Indeed, unless American society is prepared to become a pariah throughout the world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war must not stand.
Preemptive war has no precedent in our history. During the forty years of standoff between Soviet and American interests, preemptive war was never an acknowledged possibility. Now that mutual annihilation is no longer a threat to America since the fall of communism, a doctrine of preemptive war shows us merely as bullies, able and (worse yet) willing to extort and coerce. The Promise of America throughout the world dies with such a doctrine.
If this tyranny of The Five is allowed to prevail,
This war is not about terrorism, not about nuclear capability, not about germ warfare, civil abuse or the freedom of nations and peoples. It’s about what it’s always been about, it’s about oil, profit, control and power.
The difference is, that what it’s always been about has never before been established as a matter of American foreign policy in the aggressive language of preemptive strikes against any nation we perceive to be a threat. Regime change. If the tyranny of The Five is allowed to stand, the historic world-view of America will be seen as a lie and we will have become what the Soviets always called us, Imperialists.
The American people are not and have never been Imperialists!
American citizens, if they care for their legacy of freedom, if they value the brilliance of their founding principles (and principals), if they are unwilling to watch an inept, uneducated, socially isolated president throw their legacy down a sewer, must not let this tyranny of five prevail.
This is not a time for blind faith in our government. It’s a time to stand firm, to make ourselves heard, to become involved in the democratic processes we take for granted. The metaphoric barricades are no further than your own PC. Write your government, your newspaper, your friends—they all have e-mail addresses. If you don’t write, join those who do, if by nothing else but your signature or the forwarding of opinion.
And if I’m wrongheaded, write to me from my website, Jim-Freeman.com
But in any event, begin a dialog so that we don’t end up somewhere very far from our origins by the design of a mere five people.
This is not global warming, this is the global integrity and reputation of our nation.
September 18, 2002 (173 days before Iraq invasion)
Winning a war with Iraq is not the problem. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is not the problem either. We can probably achieve both missions, although the cost may be more that expected.
The problem, is what happens after we have won?
To roll the credits back a notch, let’s look at where we are in Afghanistan after ‘winning.’
Afghanistan is coming apart in our hands. And yet, the ‘quick victory’ there, the vaunted success of air power is touted as a template for what is to come in Iraq. The American public is being given the good news and withheld from the bad.
A pillar of Iraq theory has it that al Qaeda is looking to arm itself with nuclear weapons and Saddam may be close to developing a weapon. Pakistan is not close, it is there, already a nuclear power. Nuclear material, possibly intact warheads, are known to have walked off Russian nuclear stockpiles and onto the black market. If al Qaeda becomes nuclear, it’s far more practical and possible for them to acquire such weapons from those sources.
Bernard Lewis, a well regarded Princeton Middle East historian who seems to have Cheney’s ear, says
“By defeating Hitler and his Japanese allies, we did not seek to dominate Germany and Japan. Our purpose was to give the Germans and the Japanese the chance to redeem and liberate themselves. The long oppressed people of Iraq, the first and greatest victims of Saddam Hussein deserve no less.”
That’s selective-history at its worst. The war against Japan was retaliatory after they’d destroyed most of our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. We declared war and Germany immediately declared war against us. Very different circumstance. Lewis fails again, in that we absolutely damn well did seek to conquer and dominate Germany and Japan. Having done that, the Marshall Plan rebuilt their economies, while we as victors oversaw the restructuring of their political systems.
But they were not warlord societies. China, our WWII ally, failed to develop a democratic society because it was a warlord society and Chiang Kai-shek merely a warlord among warlords, soon squeezed off to Taiwan.
Iraq is a warlord society, as is Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein, much as we dislike him and wish him to be otherwise, is the Tito of Iraq, the only man capable of the power to keep Iraq’s warlords in check. He’s done it brutally, efficiently, ruthlessly. We are not prepared to be brutal and ruthless. We expect, and for some reason continue to expect in the face of the bloody evidence at hand, that wise, popular, even-handed Iraqis are merely awaiting liberation to turn their country into a Jeffersonian democracy.
It simply is not going to happen and we are on our way to expanding Muslim extremism, when it is our hope to contain it. Iran may well follow Iraq into the hellish factionalism that now overpowers our best efforts in Afghanistan.
The White House hasn’t yet asked for a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a mainstay of national security decision-making for nearly 60 years. One intelligence official says the White House decided not to request the report to “Avoid enshrining in a widely circulated document the uncertainties that persist about Iraq.”
It’s an absolute mystery to me that Saudi Arabia, whose citizens comprised fifteen of the 9/11 terrorists, whose citizenship Osama bin Laden holds, who continues to fund al Qaeda, who refuses to close down or even acknowledge al Qaeda bank accounts, is somehow our ally rather than our enemy in this furious concentration on Saddam Hussein.
A further mystery that Pakistan, a refuge for al Qaeda as well as a nuclear power is our ally, while Iraq, where there is no (forthcoming) evidence of either has to be targeted without delay, without consensus and without an endgame.
November 20, 2002 (119 days before the invasion)
These are the Robert Ludlum days, the Net is full of sites calling attention to one conspiracy theory after another. Scores of ambiguous and inherently evil powers are proposed to be behind the current administration and its war and foreign policies. Big Business, Big Oil, Big Whatever is the real force behind what’s going on.
But when has it ever been different?
Was not economic control behind the Roman Empire? Did the Portuguese or Spanish enjoy their brief time of domination for reasons of altruism or for the domination of commerce? Was the British Empire a rather soft-spoken group of cricket aficionados, or a well oiled and triumphant military/political machine designed for commercial purpose?
Great fleets and massive armies once carried the day, but the technological war-machine is today’s instrument and no force on earth can match by fractions the U.S. dominance.
If the political use of this undeniable advantage is fostered by private wealth and private gain, with little consideration for those who would oppose, what’s new in that? We are not faced with massive ‘conspiracy, but with business as usual, as it was played out since the times of Medici. It may not play out well against our image of America, may not square up with our uniquely American vision of fair play and equal opportunity, but a fact is no less a fact because of our discomfort.
And precious few of us seem to be uncomfortable. Our President enjoys nearly unprecedented support. Nations today have no meaning but in American terms. Those of us who thought and wrote and cautioned otherwise have been repudiated in the recent elections and George Bush sits deep in the saddle, with no meaningful opposition.
If one accepts that there is no conspiracy afoot, merely a meshing of ageless industrial, economic and philosophical gears, the fog lifts and we are able (perhaps) to look differently at our times.
The United States is, for better or worse, the sole power in the world today. There are many who would posit that, if a world power must evolve, better American than otherwise. Perhaps they are right. History will show a cause and an effect and the judgment is for the future.