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Bush's Never-Ending War Story: On Message, On Script
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On Message, On Script
Bush's never-ending war story boasts a shocking and awesome cast of sometimes-crazed characters
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by Linda Diebel
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It seems so long ago, but it was only March 6 when George W. Bush ambled to a podium in the East Room of the White House and began to take questions from assembled reporters in a prime-time press conference. His main message was the continuing threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and his sworn oath as president to protect the American people from that peril.Bush had a "single question" for U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. Remember him? Little Swedish guy? Seems to have disappeared?"Has the Iraqi regime fully and unconditionally disarmed, or has it not?" asked Bush.After all, the war was still almost two weeks away and there was, theoretically, still time for the Iraqi dictator to disarm."Saddam Hussein is not disarming," said Bush. "This is a fact. It cannot be denied."A fact.And then, in a slip, Bush looked up from his notes and said, "King ... John King?"Whaaaa?"Oh, that was scripted," said Bush quickly, to nervous laughter from the press corps.What he meant was that John King, CNN's lantern-jawed senior White House correspondent, was next on the pre-arranged list of questioners. What he didn't say, but many thought, was that the questions, too, were pre-arranged, that the whole thing was gasp scripted.The next day, the White House said it wasn't.In hindsight, though, the significance of that press conference seems clear.Since the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has fallen by the wayside yes, yes, they're still looking; maybe they're in Syria it appears the value of Bush's performance that night lay in alerting the public to the existence of a script. Psychiatrists might say that Bush, ever the crowd pleaser, couldn't help letting us in on the secret.And what a script it has been! What a marvellous ride this war has been for students of power politics. Now, of course, that wouldn't be your point of view if you were sitting in the rubble of your home in Baghdad, or worse, but as a study of pure political manipulation Wow!And, it's not just one war. The war against Afghanistan's Taliban regime is over. So, it would appear, is the war against Iraq's Saddam. But the War on Terror continues.Democrats are so afraid of fallout of being called unpatriotic that a "prominent Democratic senator" had to go off-the-record recently to tell the New York Times the White House is pursuing a policy of "never-ending war" in order to keep the U.S. public from focusing on Bush's domestic record and get him re-elected next year.A senator who doesn't want his name in the paper?Now, that's intimidation. You gotta stand back in awe.Well, shock and awe. That, after all, is the working title of this particular production by Bush & Co., also known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Its genesis lies in the days right after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the loss of more than 3,000 lives, when the enemy was clearly Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. It evolves into backroom deals, meticulous planning and political warfare. It highlights a panoply of larger-than-life characters, so rich in idiosyncrasy, so awe-inspiring, colourful, exciting and, at times, crazed, that only the most powerful nation on Earth could cast them all up at one time.Where to begin?
 At the top is the commander-in-chief, George Dubya, the reluctant president who, perhaps in his heart, just wanted to be the best commissioner of baseball there ever was.Had it not been for 9/11, he might never have found, for better or worse, the touchstone of his presidency. Even critics don't doubt that Bush sees the world as he says he does, as good vs. evil, them vs. us. Born Again, no booze, no drugs, he slips increasingly into the role of religious crusader.
The facilitator is Vice-President Dick Cheney who, from "an undisclosed location," always seems to be pulling strings behind-the-scenes. He once admitted he regretted not having supported marching all the way to Baghdad when he was defence secretary during the 1991 Gulf War.After Saddam fell, Cheney could barely contain his glee in castigating the war's armchair generals. In that speech, he discussed plans for Iraqi oil in such detail 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day by year's end, wellheads, spreadsheets, expected revenues he was practically using a megaphone to stress the importance of that oil to the Bush administration. Or, as Bush puts it, the "oil-that-belongs-to-the-Iraqi-people." The big picture guys arrived long before bombs fell on Baghdad. Among others, defence department adviser Richard Perle ("Prince of Darkness") and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz ("Wolfowitz of Arabia") joined administrative officials and think-tankers in putting together a plan that became the Bush doctrine.
Called the National Security Strategy of the United States, it threw out a Cold War policy of containment and embraced pre-emptive strike and regime change. The first test was Afghanistan; the second, Iraq.
Military muscle begins with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose small frame and rumpled demeanour belie his obsession with putting some real meat on the $400 billion (U.S.) annual defence budget.Working with him this time were, among others, taciturn Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; operations commander Gen. Franks (in his 50s and still called "Tommy"); and Brig.-Gen. Vincent Brooks, who reportedly auditioned for the job of chief spokesperson at Central Command briefings in Doha, Qatar. He's slim, handsome, articulate and photogenic.Rumsfeld is master of the patriot game. He practically wore his hand over his heart at Pentagon briefings.Last week, he was asked why U.S. soldiers stood around while looters stripped Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities of its treasures."It's an awful lot to ask of young men and women whose lives are at risk, to ask them to go into an area and protect everything in that area that it would be nice to protect," he replied.But, sir, didn't they protect the oil ministry building around the block?
The diplomats were led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has come out of this war so low that former House speaker Newt Gingrinch, hardly a master of the political game himself, felt free to attack him last week. Gingrich serves on Rumsfeld's Defence Advisory Board, along with Perle and, seemingly, a few thousand others.Gingrich described Washington's pre-war handling of Turkey, as "a pathetic public campaign of hand-wringing desperation" and called Powell's coming trip to Syria "ludicrous."Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage defended his boss."It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," he said.For the moment, Bush reportedly has accepted Powell's recommendation of talks with North Korea, which last week boasted it actually has the Bomb. Rumsfeld apparently opposed the talks, which is particularly scary.And, according to the Nelson Report diplomatic newsletter, Rumsfeld wanted to dispatch U.S. troops into Syria to look for deposed Iraqi officials, another idea temporarily on hold.
The spinners are a category unto themselves. Ari Fleischer is the president's press secretary who portrays Bush in the black-and-white terms good and evil, our side and theirs he seems to crave. His briefings resemble English-as-a-second-language classes for children.He speaks very slowly to the children, repeating a few simple, easily mastered, phrases.He stays "on message."The president, according to Fleischer, always seems to have two moods. He's "very happy" that the POWs have been rescued, but "very sad" other American lives have been lost. The president is "very relieved" but "very concerned" about .... Happy. Sad. Relieved. Concerned. One almost feels slapped from side to side.It's the U.S. public reduced to sitcom audience.Language is critical. "Regime change," for example. How bloodless, how surgical must be a good thing."It's the same with every White House you control the language, you control the debate," says William Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers University. "This administration is very good at it, and they've gotten better."
One man fits an entire category. Call it, the "master class." Here we have the king, Bush's political guru Karl Rove, also known as "The General."
You don't hear his name much. But behind what's called the Office of Global Communications, operating out of the White House with its 24-hour spin campaign, with everybody on message all the time, sits the Buddha, Rove. Bush calls him the "man with the plan," and he's been close to the Bush family since the 1970s, when Bush Sr. headed the Republican National Committee and Rove used to hand over the car keys (honest) when George W. came to Washington.Rove is feared. He is the first full-time political adviser to have an office right in the White House. In a recent Esquire magazine profile, Ron Suskind wrote about waiting outside Rove's office and listening to him berate some political operative who had displeased him."We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f----- him!"Wrote Suskind: "As a reporter, you get around curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking."Rove continued the rant for a few minutes, then walked out to greet Suskind, still flushed, but sweet as "Clarence the Angel" with a big, "Come on in!"Rove marks the spot where character and history meet for the Bush administration.This particular history begins on 9/11 with a hole in the ground, both a physical tragedy and psychic tear in the fabric of this great nation.But it's worth remembering that those held responsible for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, then operating from Afghanistan under the protection of that country's Taliban regime.A month later, bombs began to fall on Kabul and, within a month, the Taliban fell.But no bin Laden."You've got a 6-foot-5-inch guy dragging his dialysis machine through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we are letting him get away," Jason Stanford, a Texas-based consultant for the Democratic party, says in an interview.Stanford the only Democratic analyst brave enough to be quoted by name in Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater says he's disgusted by how easily the White House, under Rove's guidance, shifted the focus away from the elusive bin Laden to Iraq's Saddam, with more to come.Here's what he says in the book: "Hey, we can't take over a country that doesn't exist, so fine, we'll go take over some country. We can't invade Al Qaeda. We can't occupy it. We can't even find it. Okay. Fine. But we do know where Baghdad is. We've got a map. We can find it on a map. And they've got oil and an evil guy. So let's go there."Or, as Moore and Slater put it: "Karl Rove needed a better, simpler more marketable war."After 9/11, says Stanford, a number of forces came together. "There are Christian coalition people who want peace in Jesus' homeland, conservative Jewish interests who want security for Israel and then the ones who want to remake the Middle East a conservative Christian pax Americana place that exists only in the heads of crazy people."It all "dovetailed nicely" with the Bush presidency's need for a focus. The War on Terror became that focus, Stanford says, and strategist Rove took over to organize everything.Another strategist quoted in Bush's Brain says "it was starting to look like we couldn't win the war on terrorism .... Suddenly, it wasn't the people who were terrorists who killed us. It was evil itself. And that can apply to anyone they want."The never-ending war strategy fit with an agenda Cheney and Wolfowitz had "been pushing for a decade to expand American influence and military abroad into a form of empire. Rove's political strategy for the presidency transformed a policy whose scope and tenets were unprecedented in American history," say Moore and Slater."All it needed was a little justification."And Iraq was handy."The War on Terror became the "engine" that drives the Bush/Rove White House. "Rove is Nixonian in his cynicism and manipulation of patriotic themes," a Washington consultant for both parties told the authors. "It's like Rove is Nixon's heir. Cold-blooded. Ruthless. Paranoid. But, unlike Nixon, Rove has figured out how to mask it all behind Bush's smile."Is he that important?"He's the ringleader," says Stanford. "He's the one who understands what the smart people are talking about," he says. "Without Karl Rove, George W. Bush wouldn't be in the Eastern time zone. He'd be in Texas."
There is a final category of players the corporate winners. In it, we place the subsidiary of Halliburton, Cheney's old company which already has scooped up $7 billion, without bids, to rebuild Iraqi oil wells and the defence contractors Bush has visited in recent days.Another winner is the Bechtel Group of San Francisco, the multinational, privately owned construction company awarded a reconstruction deal by the United States Agency for International Development after an internal government bidding process. It's for $35 million and could soar to $680 million.It's a sliding scale, depending on costs. Canadians know about Bechtel's sliding scales.In 1971, Bechtel won the contract to build Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric project for $6 billion, a figure that doubled, then tripled, quadrupled over time, leaving then-premier Robert Bourassa with a political mess on his hands and impending loss to the separatist Parti Quιbιcois in 1976.Bechtel is a controversial company, its board of directors a revolving door for powerful Republican officials, including a former secretaries of state and defence and a former CIA chief.Laton McCartney's 1988 book, Friends In High Places, The Bechtel Story, The Most Secret Corporation And How It Engineered The World, chronicles how Bechtel settled a sex discrimination case with 80 per cent of its workforce and was accused of involvement in CIA coups in Syria and Iran. It also describes, in language reached by legal agreement, how Bechtel "creations inadvertently had generated the revenues that would help finance the regime" of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.In Iraq, Bechtel is rebuilding roads, airports, railway tracks and stations, water and electric power systems and communications centres destroyed by the war and the years of bombing by British and U.S. warplanes policing the no-fly zones unilaterally created after the 1991 Gulf War.Destroy. Rebuild.Genius, really.Or, as Bush said recently, the United States "is redefining war on our own terms."In recent days, there has been a bit of a downward spiral in Iraq, with a self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad ignoring American military law, assorted disobedient proxy politicians and U.S. troops nervously watching a return to the self-flagellation rituals of Islamic fundamentalism.But, for the moment, Bush seems to be on a roll.And the reason for war? Weapons of mass destruction? So far, nada.Blix recently gave an interview to Spain's El Pais newspaper."Consider the case of contracts for a presumed Iraqi purchase of enriched uranium from Niger," he said. "This was a crude lie. All false. That information was provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency by U.S. intelligence services. As for the mobile laboratories, in attempting to verify the data that was passed on to us by the Americans, we found only some trucks dedicated to the processing and control of seeds for agriculture."Blix continued."I originally thought the Americans began the war believing that they existed. Now, I believe less in that possibility. But I do not know. Nevertheless, when one sees the things the United States tried to do to show that Iraq had nuclear arms, such as the non-existent contract with Niger, one does have many questions."True, but it can be hard to ask them in the United States.After 9/11, criticism of the Bush administration became something more."We collapsed the identity of the country into the government," is how Lutz, from Rutgers University, describes it.So, if you criticize Bush, you are criticizing the American people. It's anti-America. It's dangerous ground, which is why Democrats are so sensitive.The polls show, for now at least, that Americans not only support Bush, they accept an unproven link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, most Americans consider the war a success, even without Saddam, without weapons of mass destruction.Not Democrat consultant Stanford."It is so horrible, it makes me sick," he says. "After failing to get bin Laden, and abdicating political responsibility, they turned it to political advantage."He faults Democrats for being gutless. They should have stuck to one message, he says: "Bring us bin Laden's head on a plate. It should have been a mantra. They should have been brave enough to get through the first month looking crazy."But he believes there is still hope for the Democrats in next year's presidential vote."Absent a war, we can beat him on his record. Bush is the only post-World War II president to have a net job loss," he says.Right. Absent a war. How likely is that?Wait for it. Sometime next year, coming to a theatre near you ....
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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