The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman, Norton (2003) 426pp.

For at least the past five years, Princeton economist Paul Krugman has been a constant and unflinching voice twice a week in the editorial pages of the New York Times. Few have lowered the boom on the Bush administration with such accuracy, consistency, and fearlessness, as has Mr. Krugman. In times when the radical right runs three branches of the federal government and has so many shrill voices in the corporate media that together form a cacophonous roar, this courage can not be understated.

In October of 2000, before the debacle we have come to know as the 2000 presidential election, Krugman made an exceedingly prescient observation, even though at the time he was specifically addressing how Bush’s tax cut proposals didn’t quite add up: “Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery. Really big misstatements, it turns out, can not be effectively challenged, because voters can’t believe that a man who seems so likable would do that sort of thing.”(p.196) The biggest misstatements, however, were yet to come; those that got a country into war on a carpet of false pretenses. But Krugman was among the first to boldly and simply call the Bush campaign’s bluff, and for this alone he deserves our utmost respect and praise.

In dissecting the Bush machine’s modus operandi, there is no one more on the ball than Krugman. In one column in June 2002, he shrewdly notes how the Bush team uses crisis exploitation (be it a poor economy, 9/11, etc.) to push through legislation faithful to a pre-existing ideology (i.e. tax cuts, increased defense budgets). He also makes mention of the politicization of terror threats: “Clearly George W. Bush believes that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won’t make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.”(p.255) How refreshing it is to have someone actually spell out what so many suspect but are too afraid to say out loud or put to the written word.

Another method is internal sabotage of the government with the appointment of under-qualified people to critical positions. The disastrous results of this policy recently manifested themselves during the hurricane Katrina disaster, with Michael Brown at the head of FEMA. Krugman calls it the “Pitt Principle” named after Harvey Pitt, the former chairman of the SEC. “The Pitt Principle tells us that sometimes incompetence is exactly what the people in charge want.”(p.264) This, Krugman writes, can be applied all the way to the position of commander-in-chief.

Saving his most conservative positions for last, Krugman in his final pages, spells out a defense of globalization and free markets. While he connects the dots in earlier essays with regards to the real reason of war with Iraq (i.e. oil and imperial expansion), Krugman somehow misses the boat when it come to how war is often pursued in the name of opening or protecting free market. Relatively, this is a very small objection to pick over, since elsewhere he is more than vindicated in his analysis. If the reader is looking for a lucid description of what exactly went wrong in the first couple of years of the new century, one could not do better than to read this collection of op-ed columns by a man in the know.

Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past – Ian Williams

Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past – Ian Williams, Nation Books/Avalon Publishing Group, 2004, 235pp. (S) ****

Perhaps the most fundamental question raised by Ian Williams in Deserter, is what does it mean to be a chickenhawk. For many, it is indeed a rather pregnant term, calling into question as much of the moral weight of those who make the charge, as of those who receive it. In partial answer to this conundrum, Williams, early in his treatise, makes this astute observation: “ . . . I began to appreciate that the very absence of a genuine, hands-on, military career for Bush the younger may well be one of the forces driving us all toward Armageddon.”(p.1) In short, ideology and pretense can kill. He later quotes Romain Rolland who famously said, “‘I find war detestable. But even more detestable are those who praise war without participating in it.’”(p.84) In a nut shell, this is what we see in George W. Bush – a man who supported the Vietnam war but did not see fit to go fight in it. And such is the critical difference, when one who like Williams, has not served, feels compelled to call a spade a spade. Then the charge of chickenhawk becomes morally permissible, particularly when the one leveling the charge is opposed to war and makes no pretense about his position. Williams puts it more eloquently, when he writes, “But when that scion of moneyed and privileged family whose main qualification has always been his inspired choice of father and family, then runs for president on issues of “character,” and struts in borrowed military plumage on the world stage while launching a real war that has killed thousands of real people, then he becomes fair game.”(p.5)

Williams also makes compelling comparisons to the fine tooth comb approach to Clinton’s absence of military service, and the kids gloves handling by the major media with respect to Bush’s dubious record. “Although many in the military had scant time for Bill Clinton, at least he did not pass himself off as some reinvented, combat-hardened veteran, nor did he embroil them in a bloody and essentially unwinnable and misguided war in a far away land.”(p.203-204) He also cites the case of Camilo Mejia, who because of conscientious objection, refused to return for duty after leave and was subsequently prosecuted as a deserter, a much different fate than that of George W. Bush, whose service record for a least a half year’s duration, is still unaccounted for. Williams points up that the ultimate tragic irony is that while Guardsmen Bush Jr had the option of checking “no” to overseas deployment, for others today there is no such option. “More importantly, such choices are denied now to the National Guardsmen who were not only called up for service in Iraq, but have found their terms extended while they were out in the desert.”(p.20) The last part of this quote is an allusion to “stop loss orders,” or what others have kindly referred to as a “back-door draft,” but for all practical purposes, could just as well be called the ultimate in psychological torture, since it is his discharge date that every soldier lives for.

We can only hope that Williams is wrong when he writes that “ . . . the world’s number one superpower is within a Chinese whisper of bankruptcy because a spoilt ivy league jock is still trying to prove himself to his war-hero father and his roughneck Texas buddies.”(p.2) But he follows this with the suggestion that “ . . . Bush’s military career has more to do with fraud [than Freud].”(p.2) Indeed, these are salient points, and for a work that was likely hastily put together in order to get it to press in an election year, we can thank Ian Williams for both his courage, honesty, and humor in addressing so murky a subject. As a final note, it’s too bad the publisher didn’t stick with the original or alternative title, Deserter: George W. Bush, Soldier of Fortune, which seems to have a nicer ring to it.

Dreaming War: Blood For Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta – Gore Vidal

Dreaming War: Blood For Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta – Gore Vidal, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 197pp. (S) ***

If there is anyone who can claim vindication, surely it is Gore Vidal. In Dreaming War, he comes out swinging as in the following, written in January 2001:

“What will the next four years bring? . . . With bad luck (and adventures), Chancellor Cheney will rule. A former secretary of defense, he has said that too little money now goes to the Pentagon. Even though last year it received 51 percent of the discretionary budget. Expect a small war or two in order to keep military appropriations flowing. There will also be tax relief for the very rich. . . . The military – Cheney, Powell, et al. – will be calling the tune, and the whole nation will be on constant alert, for, James Baker has already warned us, Terrorism is everywhere on the march. We can not be too vigilant.”(p.7-8)

Clearly Vidal has hit the nail squarely on the head. It is too bad then that he only sticks with his post 9/11/01 analysis fro only a third of what he calls his “pamphlet.” The rest he fills with his historical musings of the post World War II national security state. He devotes much of his attention to challenging what he calls three myths of RO (received opinion) that include: 1) Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, 2) the dropping of the atomic bombs was necessary in forcing Japan to concede, and 3) Stalin was the aggressor in Eastern Europe at the end of WW II. Later he analyzes the role of an expanded NATO into Eastern Europe in the 1990s. As always, there’s plenty of the wry, sardonic wit, which borders on the outright cynical, leading some readers to perhaps find some of Vidal’s style off putting or tedious. Like him or not, his is a voice that can not be ignored, especially given the accuracy of some of his prognostications. At one point Vidal claims simply that “[Bush] will leave office the most unpopular president in history.”(p.142) We can only hope that should that day come, he won’t be leaving behind the most hated nation in history.

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush – Kevin Phillips

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush – Kevin Phillips, Viking/Penguin Group (2004) 397pp. (S) ***

Kevin Phillips’ former work has addressed growing economic class inequitites in U.S. society, so that a book on the Bush aristocracy should seem like a natural transition. He is also a former Republican strategist, which gives him the unusual vantage point that comes with being an insider, when it comes to appraising Republican administrations. This time his subject is the Bush family, and with this Phillips more than has his work cut out for him.

Phillips notes that the Bush family has excelled in three principle areas: 1) intelligence, 2) energy, and 3) national security. For some, 1 and 3 may seem a bit too alike to mark any significant difference, and it is not clear if arms-trafficking would fall under the number 3 heading. Another ingredient to add to this is Texas. Phillips observes, “Texas . . . is an unusual American state, and many of its economic and cultural preferences are not those of the nation as a whole.”(p.119) While governor of Texas, George W. Bush, in a five year period, presided over more executions (152) than any other governor since the death penalty was re-instituted into law in the seventies. This, combined with Bush Jr.’s ill-fated ventures into the Texas oil industry, was pretty much all the American electorate needed to know about candidate Bush in the 2000 election. Killing in the pursuit of energy reserves like we now see in Iraq, is a natural in terms of policy advancement. But whatever makes Texas unique, be it a crumbling public education system or it being home to the city with the worst air quality in the nation (Houston), the Bush clan has found it to be fertile soil from which to launch their political careers. Maybe these facts are not exactly unrelated.

By working with long brush strokes, i.e. “Northern industrial labor unions and military draftees circa 1950 had long since [by the late 20^th century] given way to sun belt bases, nonunionized, high tech work forces, de facto private armies, and every kind of subcontractor imaginable.”(p.271) Phillips gives a more fuller picture from which the Bush legacy has evolved and prospered. Within this context, we find a deep rooted cynicism that is key to the Bushs’ electoral successes. For instance, how was Bush Sr. able to rally a country to war in the first Gulf crisis, when only in a matter of days previous to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. was still arming Saddam Hussein? The examples of this type of crass political calculation that banks heavily on the collective amnesia of the U.S. public are indeed too numerous to fully list here.

Absent from Phillips’ analysis is a comparison of candidate George W. Bush’s words and promises to the actions of Bush the president. One can’t help be reminded of now candidate Bush repeated ad nauseum how he “trust[ed] the people, not the government,” yet under his leadership, government has actually grown, both in net personnel and spending. Phillips also gives short shrift to 9/11, though this may be just as well since it may be his intent to go lightly where so many others have left deep foot prints. Also, while Phillips explores some of the dynamics in the rise of the religious right, an influence that is predominant in the Bush Jr. administration, for some reason he steers clear of the neo-conservative movement and how their pre 2000 agenda to exact “regime change” in Iraq, gave form to the aggressive Bush foreign policy.

Generally Phillips’ writing is on the ball, though the text is sometimes unnecessarily redundant, while in some places the wording is confused, and in a few rare moments, it is outright non-sensical. The sourcing and the notation are quite thorough.

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and the Education of Paul O’neill – Ron Suskind

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and the Education of Paul O’neill – Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster (2004) 348pp. (S) ***

Whistleblowers come in all shapes and sizes. During Vietnam, there was Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers. More recently there was Scott Ritter, a former UNSCOM inspector in Iraq. Paul O’neill, the first high-level defection from within the Bush administration, describes a White House that is insular (“the president was caught in an echo chamber of is own making.”)(p.293) and contradictory, how the tax cuts and the preemption policy were on a “collision with reality” and each other.

As Secretary of the Treasury, what O’neill found most alarming was the deficit spending. Tax cuts year after year with no commensurate spending cuts is a recipe for fiscal disaster. What was even more disturbing to O’neill was how Bush and his cabinet went about the decision-making process. He describes Cheney’s m.o. as leaning on Congressional members to get his message through to dissident cabinet members, in effect using Senators and Representatives as fronts for the vice-president’s agenda. O’neill also describes how he, Christine Whitman, and Colin Powell were used as political window dressing to present a veneer of moderation, “as cover” to an ideologically driven administration. His chief grievance was how ideology constantly seemed to trump reasoned, methodical thought. Time and again this is the wall O’neill came up against – a blind ideology that had the same answer to every problem, regardless of its nature. The economy’s in a rut, tax cuts. The economy’s beginning to recover, more tax cuts. In reasoning too himself, O’neill finds himself opting for “philosophy” over “ideology,” where the former “ . . . can have a structured thought base”(p.292) where by the latter, “you already know the answer to everything.”(p.292)

Aside from the above, don’t look for anything terribly profound or earth shattering in this book. What O’neill must be applauded for, though, is his courageousness in being among the first to break the silence of criticism of the administration that 9/11 had brought over the country like a suffocating pillow. In leading the charge, he made it possible for others to find their voice and put to paper their own thoughts on a runaway administration. Being the first to set a precedent is never easy, and for this Paul O’neill must surely be commended.

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush – John Dean

Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush – John Dean, Little, Brown and Company/Time Warner Book Group (2004) 253 pp. (S) *****

Short of a much needed, long overdue, unauthorized biography of Richard B. Cheney (see Dick: The Man Who Is President), the American readership nonetheless owes John Dean a debt of gratitude. In Worse Than Watergate, Dean has courageously taken a bold hand in removing the veil that so often conceals the shady undertakings of George W. Bush and his number one henchman, Karl Rove. Where most of the media has become lost by having its poorly cast dim lights refracted in clouds of thick, obscuring smoke generated by the Rovian calliope, Dean has boldly forged ahead, cracking the nut of this extremist administration’s power. Dean is undaunted as he keeps to the scent of what he bills as the most powerful vice-presidency in U.S. history, where Cheney functions as “Co-President,” or as others have put it, the most powerful man presently in Washington

Before this write-up begins to sound peculiarly, overly exuberant, it should be noted that this book is not without its flaws. While given Dean’s legal background, it is understandable that it follows he is long on legal analysis and its implications (and who better than a former Watergate conspirator [Dean was legal counsel to Nixon] to fully understand the trappings of excessive power?). This is precisely why it is so odd that he devotes so little to Bush v. Gore, the case that ushered in the Bush mess to begin with. Another glaring oversight is the Bush Administration’s preference for bilateral immunity agreements (whereby two countries agree to exempt each others soldiers from prosecution in the International Criminal Court). Also disappointing is how the author opts to quote from nearly all conservative windbags (Molly Ivins and David Corn being the most notable exceptions) such as Gingrich, Bob Barr, and Dick Armey, even though he is likely employing the “use their own words against them” stratagem. Also short on words, Dean could have possibly explored a bit more Bush’s theocratic tendencies and what the Constitutional consequences of them may be.

Dean outlines eleven scandals brewing within the Bush administration, anyone of which could spell the end if given the proper focus and momentum. Most have to do with Bush and Cheney’s past business dealings and “character” issues, (and for Cheney, health issues), while the other issues more or less focus on secrecy measures adopted by Cheney. The last potential problem for the administration that is listed is the Valerie Plame leak case, which given recent indictments handed down by special prosecutor Fitzgerald to Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, has proven to have the most traction. Regarding 9/11 Dean writes, “Bush and Cheney failed in their efforts to block a 9/11 inquiry, and . . . if Cheney’s stall in addressing terrorism had an ulterior motive, or Bush and Cheney negligently ignored warnings, it will be a horrid scandal, certainly worse than Watergate.”(p. 191) To adopt a Rovian strategy for a moment (take your opponent’s greatest strength and make it a weakness), it would seem that the 9/11 attacks should be their most tender spot, since either way, be it gross negligence or willful collusion, there is plenty of responsibility to be centered on the administration. Now if we can only embolden the Democratic leadership to focus on this point with as much energy as a chickenhawk administration employed to attack a decorated, two-tour combat veteran, then maybe the Bush crew can be unfurled from the flags they hide behind, and exposed for the shameless, criminal scoundrels they really are.

Dick: The Man Who Is President – John Nichols

Dick: The Man Who Is President – John Nichols, The New Press (2004) 248pp. (S) *****

For those who have been patiently, yet eagerly awaiting, this book is a genuine treat. Never before has someone who has occupied the number two spot at the Presidency, commanded and executed as much power as Richard B. Cheney, a man who Nichols describes as “a shadowy Zelig figure.” From his beginnings in the Ford administration, where he and a precocious Donald Rumsfeld formed a dynamic duo that ousted Robert Hartmann, then proceeded to go after Kissinger, and ultimately pushed to have Nelson Rockefeller dumped from the ’76 ticket, Cheney is a man who “at the heart of [his] calculus . . . is a complex determination to exercise power with the purpose of attaining more power.”(p. 192) More recently, Nichols writes that “everyone knew that George W. Bush would need a minder. It was not that he was stupid per se, just careless. He had broken just about everything he had ever touched – including four oil industry firms and the state of Texas.”(p. 165) To which Cheney’s job is described thusly, “Cheney plays the role of ideological commissar, constricting and manipulating the flow of information and ideas to conform to his political and personal purposes.”(p. 119) It could be said that Cheney serves as an information filter to the presidency, whereby the presidency is greatly sheltered and insulated.

Not only does Cheney so devotedly serve his superiors, but he also demonstrates a remarkable penchant for self-promotion and aggrandizement (as his heading of Bush’s vice-presidential search committee clearly indicates – he having selected himself as the most qualified candidate). In 1992, as secretary of defense, he commissioned Halliburton to do a study on the efficacy of privatizing elements of the military. Of course, as CEO of Halliburton, after a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Cheney went ahead to implement just such a policy of privatization, dealing along the way with the likes of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, and Nigeria in the 1995 to 2000 time period. Later, during the 2000 transition period “Cheney was grabbing so much power so quickly that he worked himself up to another heart attack.”(p. 166)

During the early and mid 1980s, Cheney’s Congressional voting record was more conservative than Gingrich’s, and rivaled Jesse Helm’s in the Senate. As a member of the House committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair, Cheney provided a “fifth column” for the Reagan administration, siding with the expansion of executive power at the direct expense of legislative power. As secretary of defense under Bush Sr., he and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz went to Saudi Arabia to present leaders there with cooked satellite images showing Iraqi troops at their border. It was also at this time that “Operation Scorpion” was hatched in the Pentagon, a plan that would have taken out Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. In 1992, at Cheney’s behest, Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad worked on a document entitled “Defense Planning Guidance” that for the first time introduced the policy objective of “preemption.” Unfortunately for Cheney, this paper was leaked to the New York Times and was met with displeasure by his superiors at the White House. Thus the kernel was sown for the second Gulf War.

Despite its campy jacket cover with vibrant colors and Nichols’ sometimes penchant to play the joker and to keep the tone light, his subject matter could not be more serious. All too frequently, in the popular, unthinking media but also in the more sophisticated press as well, Bush is given precedence in coverage, as if policy begins and ends with he alone. What Nichols has graciously done is to tear apart this façade to expose the proverbial “man behind the curtain.” Dick Cheney is that man.

Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential – James Moore and Wayne Slater

Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential – James Moore and Wayne Slater, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2003) 395pp. (S) ***

In the opening pages, the reader is introduced to the notion of the “permanent campaign” conducted by the “permanent consultant,” and how Karl Rove had made a model of Mark Hanna, President Mckinley’s chief aide at the turn of the nineteenth century. With Karl Rove, it is all politics all the time and appearance trumps everything, so that the trick then becomes to always have an out when you start throwing the mud. That out would be “plausible deniability,” followed by pretentious posturing that Mr. Rove’s clients are somehow morally superior to playing the petty game of politics. And what a crass and shallow game it is! As an example, Moore and Slater cite the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, where all kinds of vicious rumors were spread about Bush’s opponent, Senator John McCain – who had just come off a victory in New Hampshire. The “whisper campaign” as it is known in the Rovian lexicon, of lie and calumny naturally ran its course and did its damage, McCain losing the contest and the Bush campaign denying they had anything to do with it. Having savaged McCain with their cowardly hit and run tactics, Bush and Rove, of course, went on to win the Presidency by a five to four vote in the Supreme Court. Four years later, the astute reader will recognize a similar pattern with the smear and slander conducted by the “Swift Boat Veterans,” where the meritless allegations ran their course by a group loosely affiliated with the Bush campaign, but with just enough “plausible deniability” to keep them out of the courts.

How do they get away with it? “Neither Rove nor the Bush administration give the electorate credit for being sophisticated enough to call them to account.”(p. 296) There it is in black and white. At the core of their belief system is a rotten, cynical insolence. Politics is simply a charade, a means of propping up the façade, of maintaining what Leo Strauss called “the Big Lie.” And just what shameless limits can be reached by these lowball tactics? According to Moore and Slater, in the 2002 Gubernatorial race in Florida and in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, a campaign was orchestrated by the Rove White House where a supposedly gay advocacy group was calling voters on behalf of the Democratic candidates. No race is too small nor cause too petty for a Rovian intervention. We can see now how the gay marriage issue was later used in the 2004 presidential election, as a cultural “wedge” non-issue to pull votes away from the Kerry/Edwards ticket.

Someday, hopefully soon, these deceitful methods will catch up with Karl Rove and those who benefit from them, and they will be held to account. What is most needed is exposure, and to this purpose, Moore and Slater have performed an essential public service. After all, knowing what the problem is is half the distance to being able to take a stand and correct it. What every American should be weary of at this point is the evolution of these dirty tricks to even more sophisticated levels. With the U.S. treasury at their disposal, and a small group of men who are so drunk on power that in their careless eagerness, they are more interested in growing it than maintaining what they already have, and given such a shady past record, we should expect just about anything at this point. And as their policies continue on their inevitable downward spirals (i.e. Iraq, Social Security privatization, etc.), one can only logically expect increasingly desperate measures to stop the hemorrhage that is of their own creation. We can only pray that our fate as a nation is not too deeply interwoven with that of their own.

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror – Richard Clarke

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror – Richard Clarke, Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. (2004) 304pp. (S) ****

Though his prose often lacks eloquence, Richard Clarke’s voice is one of truth, reason, experience, and wisdom, and in writing this book, he has done his countrymen and the world a great service. In the epilogue, Clarke notes how many of his colleagues, in addition to himself, have left the Bush administration in frustration. These men and women are tremendous national treasures and assets, that have been squandered by a religious zealot. Indeed, this in itself, is a great tragedy. In observing the differences between Bush Jr. and Clinton, Clarke writes that the former is an incurious, linear thinker, who prefers wrongheaded action and resolution, while the latter is a man of measured reason, higher learning, and who possesses a much greater grasp of the complexities of life. Maybe this is why “there have been far more terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and its regional clones in the thirty months since September 11 than there were in the thirty months prior . . . ”(p. 287)

Another excerpt worthy of full quotation is as follows: “The Attorney General [John Ashcroft], rather than bringing us together, managed to persuade much of the country that the needed reforms of the Patriot Act were actually the beginning of fascism.”(p. 286)(the emphasis is mine) Finally, someone has put the forbidden word into print – the 800 lb. gorilla that no one until now has had the courage, integrity, and commonsense to point out. Though he only mentions it in passing, what better word is there to describe the present political climate, where all checks and balances have been removed via one party governance of the extreme right wing, where a militant nationalism is promulgated along with the intimate wedding of state and corporate interests. Sprinkle in a heavy shaking of religious rhetoric and you begin to have something that smells awfully like something akin to theocratic fascism.

With respect to Iraq, Clarke writes, “nothing America could have done would have provided Al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our [U.S.] unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country [Iraq].”(p. 246) He goes on later to say, “Even if Iraq still had WMD stockpiles, possession of weapons of mass destruction is not in and of itself a threat to the United States.”(p. 267) Though now this may sound like a fairly obvious statement, at the time of publication in early 2004, the U.S. was still rummaging Iraq for it infamous, and what we now have come to discover as non-existent, WMD. Furthermore, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Clarke observed this paradox, “ironically, Clinton was blamed for a ‘wag the dog’ strategy in 1998 dealing with the real threat from Al Qaeda but no one labeled Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq as a ‘wag the dog’ move even though the ‘crisis’ was manufactured and Bush political advisor Karl Rove was telling Republicans to run on the war.”(p. 186) How true. Anything Clinton got away with, the Bush administration has trumped it a hundred fold, hiding everything they do under a patriotic guise. Some might even call it the ultimate act of political chutzpah to turn the greatest breakdown in American national security history, the 9/11/01 attacks, into a political asset. Either that, or it speaks very little of an emasculated public either too diffident or fearful to call out their bluff.

Perhaps Clarke’s greatest flaw is that at times he doesn’t seem able to see beyond Bin Laden. For instance, he tells us, “I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third party nationals, or some combination who would locate Bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him.”(p. 204) Maybe the answer lies in the possibility that the CIA and FBI realized the importance of keeping Bin Laden on the shelf to be pulled out on a later date, when the U.S., in pursuit of diminishing oil reserves, really needed an enemy du jour. Such a possibility casts the 9/11 attacks themselves in stark relief. Nowhere does Clarke mention the insider “put” trading that took place around 9/11, nor does he address the notion of how one, ill man could direct and coordinate such a sophisticated attack as we witnessed on 9/11/01. Likely this is asking too much of a former government insider. That said, we can still take quite a bit away from this work that offers a glimpse into the corrupt foreign policy machinations of the Bush Jr. administration.

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 – David Ray Griffin

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 – David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press (2004) 214pp. (OBT) ***

Most writers know their limits and work within them. But isn’t it the writer who pushes the proverbial envelope who we tend to learn the most from? Working from the margins, Griffin has attempted to do just that, to extend the consciousness of the reader. As he rightly notes, “it might seem prudent simply to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ If the suspicions are correct, however, these dogs are not sleeping, but are using the official story of 9/11 for various nefarious purposes, both within our country and the rest of the world.”(p. 160) Since the “official” 9/11 script seems to have already been written and archived, some might justly ask, why bother with a closer examination. Surely the American public had no role or say in the decision to make 9/11 the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy (a massive breakdown in national security if there ever was one). Just as we were unasked toward what purposes this tragedy could be manipulated, so must we demand of ourselves to seek the rigorous answers, not allowing those with ulterior motives to speak for us.

Interestingly, one area where Griffin chooses to take his investigation, is the U.S. Space Command. Rumsfeld was chairman of the commission to assess U.S. national security space management and organization, which subsequently published a report in the second week of 2001. The report, “recommended substantial changes, including the subordination of all the other armed forces and the intelligence agencies to the Space Force.”(p. 99) The report also stated the need for a “galvanizing” event like a “space Pearl Harbor.” Given this wider, trans-global/extraterrestrial agenda, one can understand why the American flag patches on the right shoulders of U.S. service personnel, would be backward. To the confused reader, this is simple, basic iconoclasm 101. Before you substitute one symbol for another, you first must make the symbol being replaced, lose all its meaning. Improper flag display is just such a method.

For his references and notation, Griffin is largely dependent upon Paul Thompson’s 9/11 timeline and Nafeez Ahmed’s War On Freedom. Notably absent from Griffin’s text is any mention of the possible hand of Israel or the Mossad in the attacks, as in the Israeli “art students” who were allegedly shadowing the 9/11 hijackers. Nor is there any mention of the anthrax letters, and while there are plenty of references to “the Big Lie,” there is no note of its originator and espouser, Leo Strauss. Altogether, these are fairly petty bones to pick over a work that overall is fairly complete. Griffin has boldly brought to light some of the undercurrents to 9/11, now it is up to you reader to connect the dots.

What Every Person Should Know About War - Chris Hedges

What Every Person Should Know About War - Chris Hedges, Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. (2003) 175pp.

Published at a time when the Bush propaganda machine was in high gear, trying to whip up a public frenzy upon which to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, it is clear that Chris Hedges’ intent is to take a long pin to the heady emotions of a war fever balloon. The prose is matter of fact and hammers the reader with fact after disturbing fact. Here are a few examples: “There are 37,401 foreign nationals serving in the U.S. military.”(p.21) “Military rations were engineered to keep you from needing to defecate more often than once every three days.”(p.30) “Anti-personnel mines are designed to severely injure, not kill, because of the increased burden caring for injured personnel puts on a unit.”(p.46-47) Only 2% of soldiers are considered “natural killers” and they account for 50% of killing in combat. “20 to 25% of all officers killed in Vietnam were killed by enlisted men.”(p.85) “Friendly fire” possibly attributed to 15% of all American casualties in the twentieth century. “75% of all combat vehicles lost in the Gulf War were destroyed by friendly fire.”(p.86) “More Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the war than were killed during it.”(p.90)

Hedges hammers away with fact after benumbing fact, and he has the bibliography and notation to back up his statistics and to prove that he’s not administering the blows for crude shock value alone. He seems to be of the mind that if it is war that the American public genuinely seeks, then he, as a seasoned, former war correspondent, feels compelled that it is his duty to deliver to the people what they seek and want. Pull no punches and maybe the chickenhawks in Washington might be awaken by a national revulsion to their policies of aggressive war. The sad fact is, that not enough people will read this important work, a follow-up to War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, which likely reached a wider audience. What Every Person Should Know About War, reads more like a survival manual for those about to enter a combat zone (a purpose the writer admittedly concedes to in the beginning of the book). Hedges’ attitude seems to be, you want war, you got it, and this is what it is – no gloss, no glamour, just the naked brutal reality. It’s too bad that in some miraculous way, this book couldn’t be made mandatory reading for the chickenhawk neo-conservative set, though they are so steeped in their own stew of self-reinforcing fascistic miasma, that it’s doubtful that even this would make a difference. Whatever the case, Hedges has done his part in writing a potent work, so take from it what you will reader and let the chips fall where they may.

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman, Norton (2003) 426pp.

For at least the past five years, Princeton economist Paul Krugman has been a constant and unflinching voice twice a week in the editorial pages of the New York Times. Few have lowered the boom on the Bush administration with such accuracy, consistency, and fearlessness, as has Mr. Krugman. In times when the radical right runs three branches of the federal government and has so many shrill voices in the corporate media that together form a cacophonous roar, this courage can not be understated.

In October of 2000, before the debacle we have come to know as the 2000 presidential election, Krugman made an exceedingly prescient observation, even though at the time he was specifically addressing how Bush’s tax cut proposals didn’t quite add up: “Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery. Really big misstatements, it turns out, can not be effectively challenged, because voters can’t believe that a man who seems so likable would do that sort of thing.”(p.196) The biggest misstatements, however, were yet to come; those that got a country into war on a carpet of false pretenses. But Krugman was among the first to boldly and simply call the Bush campaign’s bluff, and for this alone he deserves our utmost respect and praise.

In dissecting the Bush machine’s modus operandi, there is no one more on the ball than Krugman. In one column in June 2002, he shrewdly notes how the Bush team uses crisis exploitation (be it a poor economy, 9/11, etc.) to push through legislation faithful to a pre-existing ideology (i.e. tax cuts, increased defense budgets). He also makes mention of the politicization of terror threats: “Clearly George W. Bush believes that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won’t make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.”(p.255) How refreshing it is to have someone actually spell out what so many suspect but are too afraid to say out loud or put to the written word.

Another method is internal sabotage of the government with the appointment of under-qualified people to critical positions. The disastrous results of this policy recently manifested themselves during the hurricane Katrina disaster, with Michael Brown at the head of FEMA. Krugman calls it the “Pitt Principle” named after Harvey Pitt, the former chairman of the SEC. “The Pitt Principle tells us that sometimes incompetence is exactly what the people in charge want.”(p.264) This, Krugman writes, can be applied all the way to the position of commander-in-chief.

Saving his most conservative positions for last, Krugman in his final pages, spells out a defense of globalization and free markets. While he connects the dots in earlier essays with regards to the real reason of war with Iraq (i.e. oil and imperial expansion), Krugman somehow misses the boat when it come to how war is often pursued in the name of opening or protecting free market. Relatively, this is a very small objection to pick over, since elsewhere he is more than vindicated in his analysis. If the reader is looking for a lucid description of what exactly went wrong in the first couple of years of the new century, one could not do better than to read this collection of op-ed columns by a man in the know.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror – Anonymous (Michael Scheuer)

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror – Anonymous (Michael Scheuer), Brassey’s Inc., 2004, 307 pp. (S) **

Any work published anonymously must naturally be met with a certain amount of skepticism. At least a minimal knowledge of the author helps give the reader some guidance as to where the writer’s views may be coming from. We now know that since the printing of his book, the author has gone public with his identification, his name being Michael Scheuer. His background is as an analyst in the intelligence community, and hence this is the perspective he brings. The main premise of the book, that Al Qaeda and Bin Laden specifically, despise the U.S. for its foreign policy in the Arab world and beyond, not because of who we are and the freedoms we cherish, is essentially on target. “Bin Laden is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world, not necessarily to destroy America . . . [Bin Laden] is a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.”(p. xviii) “One of the greatest dangers for Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist threat lies in continuing to believe – at the urging of senior U.S. leaders – that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than for what we do.”(p. 8) This point is repeated throughout the book, becoming nearly tedious in its redundancy. Perhaps because he is challenging one of the post 9/11/01 mantras that is so oft repeated in White House and Pentagon briefing rooms and is echoed in the corporate mainstream media, it has assumed the status of a near mythical truism of its own accord (that we are hated for who we are), he feels the need for such repetition.

In his preface and introduction, Scheuer begins with some solid statements that show great promise but that he unfortunately abandons later on in his neglect to do adequate follow-up, hence leaving the reader wanting and frustrated. “Persian Gulf oil and the lack of a serious U.S. alternative-energy development are at the core of the Bin Laden issue.”(p. xi) “ . . . [T]hat heads did not roll after 11 September is perhaps our most grievous post-attack error.”(p. xi) “The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not preemption; it was . . . an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat . . .”(p. xvii) So out of the box, he defines the “Bin Laden issue” as inextricably linked to U.S. energy policy. He also makes a passing reference to operation “Vigilant Guardian,” but again, the reader is disappointed by the absence of later follow-up. Later he quotes Graham Allison of the Economist, “‘September the llth demonstrated a level of imagination and sophistication, and audacity previously thought impossible by the American, or any other, government.’”(p. 26) Few dare venture that the 9/11/01 attacks were anything other that the artifice of a man of ill health, many thousands of miles away directing pliable underlings to carry forth his nefarious designs (and those who have and do are in this day of psychological warfare and spineless conformity, or what the author prefers to call “moral cowardice,” can only best be described as near heroic). But when one really considers this scenario – of a single genius pulling off so intricate a plan, it does seem rather absurd on its face. With such a promising beginning to his thesis, one might easily expect to find an analysis of the treatise of the Project for the New American Century in a subsequent chapter, but for the reader there is no such luck. Instead of exploring the domestic depths of possible motives, we are shoveled a full load of hot air, Monday morning quarterbacking by an arm chair, bloodthirsty bureaucrat. For instance, he quotes Brian Jenkins as stating, quite accurately to this reviewer’s mind, that “‘[T]o a large extent Osama Bin Laden is our own creation. The United States encouraged and helped him wage a holy war against the Soviet army in Afghanistan,’” to which Scheuer dismissively puts aside as all so much “cynical and false mantras.”(p. 25) Maybe he’s confused in this matter by his 1980s rose colored glasses when he calls Reagan “[a] great and good man.”(p.192) What part of great and good is there in arming Islamic fundamentalist fanatics and training them to do our dirty work, a U.S. foreign policy habit he deems elsewhere as less than chivalrous and “moral.” Perhaps, in a perverse sense, he is grateful to Reagan era policymakers for helping to ensure he had a job at the CIA’s Bin Laden unit. These are examples of a confused and ambivalent, and dare I say, hubristic, mind. Sometimes he opts to play the fatalist: (i.e. “The reestablishment of an Islamic regime in Kabul is as close to an inevitability as exists.”(p.58), “No one should be surprised when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States.”(p.158), “Status quo policy toward Israel will result in unending war with Islam.”(p.257)), while at other times he chooses to prescribe stiff medicine, “Progress [in the war on terror] will be measured by the pace of killing and yes, body counts . . . killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure.”(p.241) At one point he blurts that all of “Islam is at war with America” which seems tantamount to saying Christianity is at war with Afghanistan, only because Pat Robertson or someone of his ilk, says it’s so. Scheuer seems to have difficulty distinguishing a fringe, fundamentalist sect, from the rest of a mostly peaceful religion. Are we really to believe that a fifth of the world population is at war with us, and to date there has been no follow-up to the 9/11/01 attacks on U.S. soil?

The relevant observations that Scheuer raises are 1) “The pace and lethality of attacks by Al Qaeda and its allies between 11 September 2001 and early 2004 are substantially greater than those during the period of 1999-2001 . . . ”(p.91) and 2) “Does U.S. security require, and have the moral right, to aggressively try to install secular, democratic systems in countries that give no hint of wanting them?”(p.258) The former is a statement of fact reflecting an outgrowth of failed policy, while the latter poses the most pertinent question to an administration that, despite all the failings of current policy, clearly has ambitions beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (namely Syria, Iran, and quite possibly Saudi Arabia). How much simpler and more concise his analysis would have been if from his opening pages, he had simply chosen to follow the oil. Instead, to charge others with “fecklessness” and “moral cowardice” as he pines for a general to fall on his sword for an altruistic, career-ending purpose (do generals Shinseki and Powell ring a bell? – ok, the latter’s resignation came after the publication date, but the examples are nonetheless not hard to find) and to fill his pages with epigraphs attributable to Civil War-era leaders and generals, drawing erroneous parallels to the contemporaneous “war on terror,” when more of a likeness could be better drawn to low-intensity, counter-insurgency conflicts by occupying forces (i.e. 1950s Algeria), all the while using source material that mostly goes back no further than five years, shows deficiencies that betray something more than poor writing skills. Overall, one must eventually ask, why and to what end was this piece written. The answer may have something to do with the author eventually going public, where on 60 Minutes he made a not so subtle, dare we say “hubristic,” endorsement of the policy of “extraordinary rendition” (a policy whereby persons are captured domestically and sent abroad to countries where torture is de rigueur). The title of the book and its general thrust is designed to hook the liberal-minded reader, but by the time you roll around to its final pages, the writer is doing everything but strapping his boots on and affixing his bayonet (of course, when coming at the prompting of a pompous chicken-hawk, that would all have to be taken for the rhetorical). One can only suspect a wider agenda here, and since this is someone from the “intelligence community,” it’s not too far of a jump to call this kind of writing “psychological prepping” in the halls of public opinion, where “opinion-makers” try to mold ideas into more palatable servings. Are we to really begin gearing up for the “holy war” ahead? Is this genuine understanding? Thankfully, there are plenty of other sources on this subject matter that provide more apt questions with clearer answers and more rewarding discourse.

History of the United States – Harvey Wasserman

History of the United States – Harvey Wasserman, Perennial Library/Harper & Row Publishers, 1972, 262 pp. (LF) ***

It is interesting to see how a book now almost thirty-five years old, has held its water over the years. Wasserman’s look at the Gilded Age, or to use the muckrakers more preferred term, the “Robber Baron” period, takes a populist approach to the period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as a peak at the progressive period in the early decades of the twentieth. While it is clear that the book was written as a reaction to the more ponderous, weighty works of history yore, the title itself makes for a bigger billing than its actual bite. Since the work is confined to the period aforementioned, the reader must look past the misleading title, to read Wasserman’s accounts of some of the more infamous events of the period, be it the Ludlow massacre or the Haymarket bombing. Familiar names like Eugene Debs, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Emma Goldman are given their righteous due, though in his follow up on the women’s movement, Margaret Sanger gets noted while Elizabeth Caty Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are oddly left out. In the age of Karl Rove, it is certainly interesting to read of Mark Hanna (a man Rove likes to believe he fashions himself after) and his Republican-corporate propaganda machine and the suspicious tally of the 1896 election where there were more ballots cast than actual voters. (Given the known theft of the 2000 presidential election and the likely theft of the 2004 election, it is interesting to read of this precedent, which may serve as more of a guide to the Bush administration than many may comfortably wish to believe [i.e. both pursued a foreign policy of aggressive, militarily engaged expansionism in the milieu of crony corporatism on the domestic front].) However, not to be outdone, Wasserman also writes of the post-Civil War southern Democrats of the 1870s that “in undisputed control of the electoral machinery, the Democrats stole at the ballot box those elections they could not win by persuasion.”(p. 85) Wasserman also explores the movements of third party entities and labor unions with the likes of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Southern Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the IWW Wobblies, and the Grange movement, where in some instances, race relations were bridged when a broader class consciousness was realized. It is interesting to read how much economic power some of these groups wielded against industry, however fleeting such moments may have been. With the advent of radio and other technology and the urbanization of the population, these movements subsided and membership declined so that organizations became obsolete in the face of post-industrial modernism and middle-class consumerism. Nonetheless, in the age of Wal-Martization, one can’t help reading admiringly of the days when labor had its say and was listened to.

Blood Bankers: Tales From the Global Underground Economy – James S. Henry

Blood Bankers: Tales From the Global Underground Economy – James S. Henry, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, 417 pp. (S) ***

This is an exhaustive text that bombards the reader with so many facts, figures, and statistics, that one might well begin to believe he’s reading a calculator. A functional familiarity with both macro and micro economics would do the reader well, for this is no work for the casual perusing. The broader theme of how international banking institutions have extracted the wealth and resources via mostly duplicitous fiscal measures, from the developing world over the past fifty years, is far more gripping than when the investigations become bogged down in the minutiae of numbers. Among the examples or rather targets of economic exploitation that Henry cites are the Phillipines, Brazil, Nicaragua – which probably reads as the most upsetting, given the promise of the Sandinista revolution and how the country has since become one of the poorest in the hemisphere, Argentina, and Chile. Were I an economist, I certainly would be able to provide a much more extensive and informed critique. Be that as it is, I can’t recommend this book to the lay reader. I will add that one glaring omission in the text is how the international narcotics trade figures into illicit banking practices (i.e. the laundering of billions of dollars), a connection that others have made. There is only cursory mention of the infamous BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), a bank that laundered great amounts, and according to some, served as a front for covert operations, if not a credit source, and which imploded in the early 1990s. Henry, though, does deserve credit for covering the Banco Nacional del Lavoro fiasco, where billions in USDA subsidies and credits were funneled through its Atlanta office to finance Saddam Hussein’s military. Finally, the notation, at thirty-three pages, is meticulous and it is clear that a great amount of effort and research has gone into the work. Given this, it’s a shame that it doesn’t have a more wider appeal outside of the fields of economics, mathematics, and statistics. Either that, or it’s high time we all began brushing up on our economic history.