The
Life and Crimes of George W. Bush
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Part
Three: More Pricks Than Kicks
Relations inside the Bush cabinet have
not always collegial and harmonious. Take Richard Armitage, the
longtime diplomatic fixer. Armitage had originally been slated
by the Bush transition team for installation as the number two
man at the Pentagon. But Armitage despised Donald Rumsfeld's
megalomaniacal style and reportedly denounced openly him as "a
prick." Armitage ended up back at State and Paul Wolfowitz,
the crafty neo-con, became Rumsfeld's slavishly devoted deputy.
Rumsfeld had good reason to
fear Armitage and some of the other old hands at State. Not because
Armitage and Powell weren't itching for war with Iraq. Oh, no.
It was a tussle over who would call the shots and how it would
be launched: Powell's office wanted a reprise of the 1990 coalition;
Rummy wanted war on his own terms. The men and women at Foggy
Bottom knew some unsavory tidbits about Rumsfeld's past relations
with two pillars in Bush's Axis of Evil: Iraq and North Korea.
In the early 1980s, Rummy was
grazing in the corporate pastures as a top executive fixer at
G.D. Searle, the drug giant involved in the aspartame scandal.
Then Reagan called. The Gipper summoned Rumsfeld to serve as
his special emissary for the Middle East, assigned with the delicate
mission of delivering back channel communications from the White
House to Baghdad. This was the beginning of the so-called Iraq
Tilt, the subtle backing of Saddam during the gruesome Iran/Iraq
war.
December 20, 1983 found Rumsfeld
in Baghdad supping with Saddam and Iraq's foreign minister Tariq
Aziz. By all accounts the day long session was amiable and cordial.
Rumsfeld chose not to issue a remonstrance about Iraq's lethal
use of chemical weapons against Iran. Rumsfeld, known as the
Prince of Darkness by some of his staffers, was well acquainted
with the slaughter. He was in possession of a State Department
memo dated November 1, 1983 by Middle East specialist Jonathan
Howe who warned the administration of "almost daily use
of CW by Iraq against Iranian forces."
Rumsfeld blew off the reports
of atrocities and instead encouraged Saddam to press his war
on Iran. By February 1984, a UN investigation publicly confirmed
the gassings, but that didn't deter Rumsfeld from meeting with
Tariq Aziz again on March 26, 1984, where he again failed to
reprimand the Iraqis (now essentially pursuing a proxy war for
the US) for the war crimes. Two decades later, Rumsfeld, without
cracking a grin, repeatedly invoked Saddam's use of poison gas
in the 1980s as a justification for Bush's pre-emptive war.
Cut to 1994. Now Rumsfeld plying
his craft back in the corporate milieu, this time for the Swiss
engineering giant ABB, which specializes in the construction
of nuclear power plants. In the fall of that year, ABB received
a $200 million contract to construct two light-water reactors
for the Pyongyang government, under a deal sanctioned by the
State Department during the Clinton years. Oddly, Rumsfeld was
later to cite the reactors as evidence of North Korea's malign
intention to pursue the development of nuclear weapons and used
the reactors as justification for sinking billions in Bush's
Star Wars scheme. When confronted by the fact that the reactors
under scrutiny had been sold to North Korea by his very own company,
Rumsfeld feigned ignorance, just has he had done when presented
with a videotape of him greeting Saddam. But the boys at the
State Department knew the score on both counts and Rummy didn't
like it.
Indeed, Rumsfeld, the Polonius
of the Bush team, so distrusted the ecumenicalists in the State
Department that he set up an off-the-shelf operation sequestered
firmly under his control called the Office for Special Plans,
headed by Douglas Feith. Sound familiar? It should. The OSP is
not all that different from the William Casey/Oliver North operation
that had its stealthy hands in illegal meddlings from Iran and
Afghanistan to Honduras and Nicaragua. But see how far we've
matured as a nation in 20 years. Rumsfeld's group was an open
secret, shedding even the pretense of covertness.
The OSP operates as kind of
cut-and-paste intelligence shop that served up as fact any gothic
tale peddled by Ahmed Chalabi or the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC). Feith made a pest of himself, meddling in
the affairs of the war planners. He was reviled by Gen. Tommy
Franks, who called him "the dumbest motherfucker on the
face of the Earth."
This didn't deter Feith in
the least. He recruited a roster of pliant neo-cons into his
office, who generated the phantasmagorical briefs for the war
to topple Saddam, which he had hungered for since at least 1994.
Feith's OSP office was known by State Department hands as the
Fantasy Factory. Among Feith's pack of underlings, two have received
special attention, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, for their
intimate relationship with the state of Israel. Franklin, perhaps
the scapegoat for a larger scandal, finds himself the target
an FBI investigation into Israeli espionage ring in the Pentagon
and National Security Council.
Feith himself is no stranger
to such inquiries into leaking classified information to the
Israeli. In 1982, Feith was fired from his position as an analyst
on Middle East issues in the Reagan administration's National
Security Council on suspicion of leaking material to the an official
with the Israeli embassy in Washington. Don't cry for Feith.
He simply moved out of the White House and over to the Pentagon
as a "special assistant" to Richard Perle, then assistant
secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.
When the Republicans were driven
from office in 1992, Feith settled into a comfortable niche as
a DC lawyer/lobbyist with the firm Feith and Zell, where he represented
the interests of many Israeli firms hot to see the demise of
Saddam. After Feith joined the Bush 2 administration, his former
law partner, Marc Zell, moved the firm to Tel Aviv.
During the war on Iraq, Feith
was given the responsibility's planning for the occupation of
Iraq and its reconstruction. Obviously, Feith spent little of
his attention on the troublesome details of the occupation, swallowing
the line that Iraqis would welcome their conquistadors. Instead,
Feith devoted himself to the lucrative task of awarding many
of the Coalition Provisional Authority's reconstruction contracts.
He steered many of the most lucrative deals, often on a no-bid
basis, to clients associated with his former law firm, including
Diligence, New Bridge Strategies and the Iraqi International
Law Group, headed by Salem Chalabi-the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi.
No sooner had Salem Chalabi, whose Law Group billed itself as
"your professional gateway to the new Iraq," been appointed
chief prosecutor in war crime trial of Saddam Hussein than he
found himself indicted by an Iraqi prosecutor for involvement
in a strange political murder plot. Now Salem Chalabi is on the
lam in London.
Feith is one of those Washington
creatures who seems to live his political life on the ropes,
always saved by the paranoid solidarity of the neo-con claque,
which suspects, rightly, that if one of their number topples
he may take the rest down with him. Of course, even if Feith
is forced to walk the plank at the Pentagon, he will almost certainly
make a soft landing in the private sector, embraced by the firms
he abetted while in office.
Sometimes even the stupidest
motherfucker on the face of the earth can make out like a bandit.
* *
*
Even Bush Sr. stood in line
to profit handsomely from his son's war-making. The former president
on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held
defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci,
who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of
Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci was also Donald Rumsfeld's
college roommate at Princeton.
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of
global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn't negotiate
arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high
level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle
East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive
business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington
Post, Bush Sr. earns at least $100,000 for each speech he makes
on Carlyle's behalf.
One of the Saudi investors
lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction
conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According
to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced
Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama's half brother, to sink $2 million of
BinLaden Group money into Carlyle's accounts. In a pr move, the
Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
One of Bush Sr.'s top sidekicks,
James Baker, is also a key player at Carlyle. Baker joined the
weapons firm in 1993, fresh from his stint as Bush's secretary
of state and chief of staff. Packing a briefcase of global contacts,
Baker parlayed his connections with heads of state, generals
and international tycoons into a bonanza for Carlyle. After Baker
joined the company, Carlyle's revenues more than tripled.
Like Bush Sr., Baker's main
function was to manage Carlyle's lucrative relationship with
Saudi potentates, who had invested tens of millions of dollars
in the company. Baker helped secure one of Carlyle's most lucrative
deals: the contract to run the Saudi offset program, a multi-billion
dollar scheme wherein international companies winning Saudi contracts
are required under terms of the contracts to invest a percentage
of the profits in Saudi companies.
Baker not only greases the
way for investment deals and arms sales, but he also plays the
role of seasoned troubleshooter, protecting the interests of
key clients and regimes. A case in point: when the Justice Department
launched an investigation into the financial dealings of Prince
Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi prince sought out Baker's help.
Baker is currently defending the prince in a law suit brought
by the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks that he used
Islamic charities as a pass-through for sending millions of dollars
to al-Qaeda linked operations.
Baker and Carlyle enjoy another
ace in the hole when it comes to looking out for their Saudi
friends. Baker prevailed on Bush Jr. to appoint his former law
partner, Bob Jordan, as the administration's ambassador to Saudi
Arabia.
Carlyle and its network of
investors is well-positioned to cash in on Bush Jr.'s expansion
of the defense and Homeland Security department budgets. Two
Carlyle companies, Federal Data Systems and US Investigations
Services, hold multi-billion dollar contracts to provide background
checks for commercial airlines, the Pentagon, the CIA and the
Department of Homeland Security. USIS was once a federal agency
called the Office Federal Investigations, but it was privatized
in 1996 at the urging of Baker and others and was soon gobbled
up by Carlyle. The company is now housed in "high-security,
state-of-the-art, underground complex" in Annandale, Pennsylvania.
USIS now does 2.4 million background checks a year, largely for
the federal government.
* *
*
Thanks to Paul O'Neill, Bush's
former treasury secretary, we now know what we'd suspected all
along: that the Iraq war was plotted long before al-Qaeda struck
New York and Washington. Bush himself is depicted as entering
office seething with vindictive rage like a character in a Jacobean
revenge play. After all, he believed that Saddam had tried to
kill his daddy in a bungled bomb plot during Bush Sr.'s triumphal
entry into Kuwait City in 1993. Here we have one of the colorful
features of the new dynastic politics of America: familial retribution
as foreign policy.
O'Neill's version is backed
up by Richard Clarke, the former NSC terrorism staffer. Clarke
charges that Iraq was an idée fixe with the Bush team
since their entry into Washington. In his book, Clarke describes
a meeting with the president a few days after the 9/11 attacks
when it was clear to nearly everyone that they had been orchestrated
by Bin Laden. Bush needled Clarke about finding a link to Saddam.
Clarke said there was none. But his answer seemed to bounce off
Bush's brain like a handball off the back wall.
A few months later the invasion
on Iraq seemed set in stone. "Fuck Saddam," Bush fumed
at a meeting of the National Security Council in March of 2002.
"We're taking him out." Call it a case of pre-meditated
pre-emption.
The game plan for deposing
Saddam, seizing his oil fields and installing a puppet regime
headed by a compliant thug such as Ahmed Chalabi or, as it turned
out, the CIA favorite Ahmed Allawi, was drafted and tweaked by
the National Security Council within weeks of taking office.
Cheney's shadowy energy task force even produced maps allocating
Iraqi reserves to different oil companies. Of course, they didn't
offer an exit strategy. Perhaps, they didn't plan on leaving?
On the remote chance that impeachment
charges are ever leveled against this coven of pre-emptive warriors,
Bush may have a minor case for plausible deniability here. According
to O'Neill, the president drifts off during the excruciating
tedium of these sessions. Bush only perks up during cabinet meetings
when Condi Rice strolls into the room, whereupon he cleaves to
each sanguinary phrase, nodding excitedly like his very own bobblehead
doll.
Not that Bush seems to care
all that much about the veracity of his briefings, but Rice's
information is not always noted for its reliability. For example,
Rice, who got her start in politics working on the 1988 presidential
campaign of Gary Hart, persisted for months in pushing the the
preposterous notion that Iran was working with Pakistan to inflame
anti-American sentiments across Southwest Asia. Of course, the
rulers of Iran are Shiites and the elites of Pakistan are Sunni
Muslim and, thus, as bitter rivals as Iran and Iraq-that is,
until, the Bush administration succeeded in congealing their
desperation and rage.
Tomorrow: Jesus Told Me
Where to Bomb
Part
One: The Ties That Blind
Part
Two: Mark His Words
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
and, with Alexander Cockburn, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.
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