| |
Foible or fable? You
decide
By Ehsan Ahrari
Washington is notorious for its "kiss and tell",
whereby insiders with official or unofficial status,
when they are no longer part of that privileged corps,
decide to spill their guts to the media for a variety of
reasons. Former treasury secretary of the Bush
administration, Paul H O'Neill, has emerged as the most
recent practitioner of that art. His rationale for going
public: because the Bush administration has been too
secretive about how decisions are made.
In a
book entitled The Price of Loyalty, authored by a
former Wall Street Journal reporter, Ron Suskind,
O'Neill becomes the only former government official to
go on the record in passing unflattering remarks about
President George W Bush, his decision-making style, and
about his obsession to topple Saddam Hussein from power.
This last mentioned issue will receive worldwide
attention, especially O'Neill's claim that Bush made the
decision to invade Iraq in January or February of 2001,
immediately after entering the White House, and way
before the terrorist attacks of September 11, as has
been understood up until now.
Suskind's book is
also viewed as a credible source on Bush's
decision-making style and other sensitive issues of his
administration because the author claims to have spoken
with a number of current members of the Bush cabinet on
a "background basis".
On Bush's decision-making
style, O'Neill states: "The president did not make
decisions in a methodical way: there was no free flow of
ideas." He describes Bush as "disengaged", at least on
domestic issues. But he went beyond that description and
noted Bush was "like a blind man in a room full of deaf
people". Consequently, cabinet officials were forced to
act "on little more than hunches about what the
president might think".
Regarding Iraq, O'Neill
states that going after the Iraqi dictator was "topic A"
10 days after the inauguration - eight months before
September 11. He describes the very first meeting of the
National Security Council (NSC) as follows: "From the
very beginning there was a conviction that Saddam
Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." From
then on, adds O'Neill, "It was all about finding a way
to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying,
"Go find me a way to do this." What bothered O'Neill
was, for him, "the notion of pre-emption, that the US
has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do,
is a really huge leap". The most troubling aspect of
this issue was, according to him, no one at the NSC
meetings ever asked the questions, "Why Saddam?" and
"Why now?"
Coming soon after the fact that no
weapons of mass destruction were uncovered in Iraq, the
topic of when the decision to invade Iraq was really
made is likely to become a subject of national debate. A
related issue that is likely to spring up is whether
reasons to topple Saddam were truthfully stated by the
Bush administration.
But it is hard to consider
O'Neill's claims about Iraq in a vacuum. Reading Bob
Woodward's book, Bush At War, one gets a clear
and repeated message that Bush did not make up his mind
about toppling Saddam's regime before deciding to topple
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In a number of places
in that book, Woodward describes Bush as stating
something to the effect that "let's concentrate on
Afghanistan and we'll worry about Iraq at a later date".
Apparently, a journalist of Woodward's caliber could not
have been deceived. At the same time, a related question
is whether the Bush officials have purposely fed him
wrong information on the subject.
Another
controversial aspect of Suskind's book is that plans to
occupy Iraq were discussed in January and February of
2001. According to the documents examined by the author,
the Bush administration discussed plans for peacekeeping
troops, war tribunals and even divvying up Iraq's oil
wealth. One Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors
for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" includes a map of
potential areas of exploration. If true, these
revelations will once again start the global debate that
the Bush administration had its eyes on the Iraqi oil
all along, and that Saddam's predilections to develop
weapons of mass destruction for toppling his regime was
only a ruse to gain control of those awesome oil
reserves.
If the US had plans for peacekeeping
and other related matters in Iraq, why did Washington
appear unprepared about the entire issue of
nation-building after the collapse of the Iraqi
government? Bush was never secretive about this
antipathy toward nation-building as a presidential
candidate. Is it possible that all that antipathy
dissipated once he entered the White House? But events
after the collapse of the Iraqi government did not prove
that the US government had any elaborate plans for
rebuilding Iraq.
As the dust storm created in
the aftermath of the release of Suskind's book settles,
a number of questions related to the US invasion of Iraq
will be raised. However, no one is making any bets that
the future of Bush's reelection depends on finding
answers to any of those questions.
Ehsan
Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based
independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
