"Their View" Archives:

March 21, 2004

• Creating Iraq In Our Image
• The New Face of America
  (Ranting Sheep Are But A Tempest In A Tea Pot)

March 14, 2004

• To Rock the Vote, Knock It, or Block It
• Why I Still Like Bush (A Word to the Pseudo Cons)

What They Thought March 28, 2004

R.A. Hawkins
Jonathan David Morris

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Jonathan David Morris:
9/11: Blood On Bush's Hands?

Over the weekend, former Bush administration official Richard Clarke -- author of the new book, Against All Enemies -- told 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it." That's a serious charge by any stretch, but even more so once you realize Clarke's role at the White House: He advised George Bush on terror.

Intriguing? To say the least.

Clarke claims he asked for "a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack" when Bush came into office in January '01. The meeting didn't take place till September -- at which point it was too late to do any good. And his warnings, all along, went unheard.

"I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden,'" Clarke says of an April '01 discussion. "Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no... We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism.'"

In fact, according to Clarke, Iraq remained atop Team Bush's to-do list even right after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Donald Rumsfeld, for one, pushed hard for war with Baghdad. As Clarke puts it, Rumsfeld "said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan," but "lots of good targets in Iraq" -- which is odd, since Iraq didn't house Usama bin Laden and the Taliban.

And as for the president? "The president dragged me into a room... and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this,'" Clarke says. "Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted... a report that said Iraq did this."

Bush has since said for the record Iraq did not.

So now the clean-up crews are working overtime in their effort to discredit Dick Clarke. Writing in the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice defended Bush's first days in office. "The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or 'roll back' the threat," she said. "The president and Congress, through the USA Patriot Act, have broken down the legal and bureaucratic walls that prior to Sept. 11 hampered intelligence and law enforcement agencies."

More to the point, Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that Clarke "wasn't in the loop... on a lot of this stuff." In fact, according to Cheney, Bush was unimpressed with Clarke's results as Bill Clinton's terrorism czar -- and so much so he demoted Clarke from a Cabinet-level post.

And asked by Limbaugh if the administration "wanted to go in and level Iraq" before 9/11 -- as Clarke claims -- Cheney said, bluntly, "that's just not the case."

Yet, to a degree, we know that it is.

In a letter marked January 26, 1998, the Project for the New American Century -- or PNAC -- urged then-president Clinton to adopt a strategy that would "aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." This strategy was to include "a willingness to undertake military action," with an eye towards ending "the threat of weapons of mass destruction." And should Clinton adopt it, PNAC said, "We stand ready to offer our full support."

Eighteen men signed this letter -- including future Bush administration officials Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Cheney himself signed PNAC's 1997 Statement of Principles, as did Jeb Bush.

The vice president is entitled to defend his pre-9/11 support for regime change. But to shrug it off like it never existed? That's "just not the case," I'm afraid.

But let's get back to Clarke for a moment. Let's assume he really was out of the loop. This man's White House tenure dates back through Clinton and Bush, Sr., all the way to Ronald Reagan. Even with his demotion, we're not talking about an entry-level grunt or intern here. We're talking about a man who's spent three decades in government (sort of like Saddam). So even if he does hold a grudge, and even if his book is self-serving, what's it matter if his facts check out? It's not like he's the first former Bush official to make these claims.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill said of the Bush White House recently. Now, of course, no one's going to deny Saddam's being "a bad person," but what about his weapons? Was America's war truly an act of self-defense? Not according to O'Neill, it wasn't. "I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction."

O'Neill was quickly dismissed as bitter. He wasn't a team player, they said. That's why the administration fired him.

Nazi Germany had folks who weren't team players. Hitler called them "the Jews."

And say what you will about Clarke and O'Neill, but their stories aren't uncorroborated. In 2002, Bob Woodward -- the man who broke Nixon -- published Bush at War. "Before the [9/11] attacks, the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq," Woodward wrote in his even-handed account. By 9/12, "Rumsfeld was raising the possibility that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately." Just like Clarke has suggested.

Americans were sold a war in self-defense. September 11th "changed everything," it was said, and we mustn't allow terrorists to get weapons from states like Iraq. Yet, last year, Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction." Perle, too, told a London crowd last November, "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." The bottom line is this war was going to happen one way or another, whether we liked it or not.

Which brings us back to 9/11.

Two months before the 2000 election, PNAC proposed a defense strategy that'd "preserve and extend" -- keyword: "extend" -- America's "position of global leadership." Its realization would be slow in coming, they said, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." On September 11, 2001, under PNAC's watch, a catastrophic and catalyzing event occurred. Anthrax-laced envelopes popped up soon thereafter, planting a seed for war over WMDs. To date, we've found neither the person who sent those letters nor weapons in Iraq. That's three major intelligence failures. We're supposed to give them more money and more power now. Oh, but don't worry: They want to "protect" us. They want to "democratize" the world.

Last December, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean said 9/11 "was not something that had to happen." The White House has only reluctantly cooperated with Kean's 9/11 panel.

"Now, who knows what the real situation is," Howard Dean said last year, "but the trouble is that by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories."

We hear so much about foreign dictators. We know leaders cause problems to keep themselves employed. Why is it some questions about 9/11 are out-of-bounds? Americans ought to be asking all questions, even the seemingly silly ones. Assessing our own errors won't bring back the victims, but it won't trash their memory, either. Mistakes were made. We know this. But was it incompetence or corruption? Dean's comments were criticized, but his logic was spot-on: The fact is we don't know what happened. If the White House is on the up-and-up here -- if their want for regime change was as well-intentioned as it now seems ill-advised -- they should open up and show us, for their sake and ours.

Patriot Act supporters tell civil libertarians they don't have to worry if they've done nothing wrong. The same standard should apply to elected officials and bureaucrats. They have nothing to fear if they've nothing to hide. But if they hide? Perhaps we should fear them.

Jonathan David Morris      Web Site       Contact

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Lady Liberty's "Their View" Contributors:

R.A. Hawkins
Richard Hawkins was born in Aurora, Colorado and grew up in Littleton, Colorado in a quiet little neighborhood nobody has ever heard of called Columbine Knolls. He has been married to the same woman for twenty-six years, and worked for the same aerospace company for twenty-eight. His primary interests over the years have been his family, sociology, mastering his survival skills, windsurfing, music, politics, raising wolves, art of all types, mycology, perma-culture, archeological anomalies, geo-politics and staying gainfully employed; not necessarily in that order. He often describes himself as a separate subspecies of human – ‘Eclecticus-Iconoclastimus’. His primary driving force is his unwavering belief that as sovereign citizens we are each responsible not only for our own beliefs and actions, but where those beliefs and actions take us in life: That the truly intelligent person learns to determine what the consequences might be for our beliefs and actions and then acts accordingly. Our individual actions always affect far more than we can imagine. R.A. Hawkins is the author of "Through Eyes of Shiva," available via Amazon.com. More of Mr. Hawkins' commentaries can be found on his web site, Entropical Paradise.

Jonathan David Morris
Jonathan David Morris is a political writer based in New Jersey. A strong believer in small government, JDM often takes aim at oppressive taxes, entitlements, and laws, writing about incompetence at the highest levels of culture and government. Catch his weekly ramblings on his web site.

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R.A. Hawkins
Entangling Alliances
(Not On My Tires, You Don’t!)

Many talk of avoiding ‘entangling alliances’ without understanding what was meant by the Founding Fathers when they said to avoid them. A good example of a real entangling alliance would be the United Nations. They want to disarm the American populace and tax us into the ground so they can level the playing field for a bunch of people that already hate us. That folks, is what an entangling alliance is. So is NATO at times. However NATO was only set up as a safeguard against Soviet invasion. Since some of those allies have started dealing with our enemies up to and including providing materiel support, intelligence and advisors, NATO can also be called an entangling alliance.

There are other types of entangling alliances that are a little different though. China’s one sided trade deal with us is an entangling alliance because we can only buy from them. What can the people of China possibly buy from us? They can’t even afford to buy toilet paper that doesn’t feel like sandpaper. Their Government steals all of their wages, so they can build their military up for a war over Taiwan. Many people forget that it was Castro loving Jimmy Carter who decided to recognize Mainland China instead of Taiwan. Because of that, many people view our agreement with Taiwan regarding defense as an entangling alliance. That’s one of the problems with public schools though, but then again there are a lot of home schoolers that think that way and pass on their ignorance as though it was handed down from on high.

There is yet another type of entangling alliance. It is a little different however. It is the type of alliance that people join into as free agents and then surrender their minds. They will always vote in favor of entangling alliances, but those are things that simply can’t be helped. Those who sign on for that type of thing get what they deserve in the long run. I was reading an article at a site that is now dripping with that ‘leave your mind at the entry page’ type of mentality. The writer was talking about how we in America only make up five percent of the world population and they don’t like us attacking those who attacked us. Nobody over there will be smart enough to see this as yet another aspect of the ‘we are the world’ crowd. (That would be the United Nations crowd) The premise of the article is that the rest of the world doesn’t like us right now because we attacked the Afghanistan Taliban and Iraq for supporting Al-Qaeda who attacked us in the first place.

For those people and those people alone I’m going to put it in terms even they might be able to comprehend.

Let’s say you have a farm and it is filled with cattle that are being ravaged by a pack of wild dogs. Being the nice guy you claim to be, you begin feeding them so they will stop eating your cattle. Then you wake up one day to find that “Zowie! There are now three times as many as there were before.” Nothing slips by you, does it! That doesn’t bother you one bit because you just put more feed out there to stop them from eating your cattle. Six months later there are once again even more of them. Many are quite a bit younger but a fair number of them have been recruited because of the good extortion racket. But you are now faced with nine times the number of original animals as you were before. Your neighbor is a little sharper than you are and decides he isn’t going to put up with the rampaging animals anymore. See you didn’t notice that you not only multiplied your problem, you increased his problem too.

You dutifully drive into town one day having to buy nine times the amount of food you used to buy, and pass your neighbor who is just leaving town. He makes a very rude hand sign at you and you can’t understand why. When you return home you find out why. Your neighbor is in the process of removing the wild dog pack with the rifle and high capacity magazines he just bought. He, unlike you, is pleased the Republicans caused the Assault Weapons ban to sunset in spite of your attempts to get the Republicans out of office because they didn’t make a politically stupid rant to make you happy. He, unlike you, is pleased only with results. That is why he is in the process of removing the pack of dogs you created.

You notice immediately that the dogs are mad at your neighbor and begin to side with them. You threaten to call the ASPCA and he flashes that strange hand sign again. He did it because you had an entangling alliance with the dog pack. This never occurs to you as you sit there and thanklessly eat your first steak in a year.

This is what happens when we live in our own little world and ignore the rest of it. It really is that simple.

For those of you whose world is strictly below the Mason Dixon line and in the United States, or simply in the United States, Russia spoke of the 911 attacks in the Duma in June of 2001. They knew about it before it happened. The higher gas prices are not due to anything other than that nice little beret wearing, Castro loving Dictator known as Chavez. Castro was Russia’s boy in case you don’t remember that either. Since your world doesn’t extend that far south, let me explain it to you, Chavez is the head of OPEC. He cut oil production with the express purpose of creating financial difficulties right about election time.

Regarding the war on terror, Iraq was training terrorists to take over airliners with knives at Salmen-Pak. The Taliban was harboring Al-Qaeda and their leader bin Laden. And for those who can’t understand any of these reasons as to why we’ve done what we’ve done: Go read some of the speeches the liberals put out regarding these matters when Bubba was queen. Do try to pay attention and stay off of the couch!

R.A. Hawkins       Web Site       Contact