COMMENTARY Surprise, surprise -
Bushites caught
napping By Tom
Engelhardt
Among Bush administration opponents -
and not just those on the Internet either - there's a
deep-seated, Florida-inspired, and not unreasonable fear
of an October or even November 2 "surprise". Over the
past year, for instance, there have been spasms of
Diebold-mania (in honor of one of the Republican-donor
firms making the paper-trail-less, touch-screen-computer
voting machines, considered quite capable of producing a
Florida II). Or what about those "felon lists",
endlessly purged in Baby Bush's state (President George
W Bush's brother Jeb is governor of Florida) of
perfectly un-felonesque African-American Floridians but
not of (usually Republican-voting) Hispanics, felonious
or otherwise? Michael Moore is heading for the state on
election day, camera in hand, but who isn't?
Then there have been those conspiracy-theory
rumors that Osama bin Laden is already an administration
captive held in a spiderhole somewhere in Pakistan until
needed at the end of October. Or is al-Qaeda perhaps
preparing a massive, last-moment terrorist attack in the
United States meant to throw the election to the "other
fanatic", the one most likely in his second term to
continue to produce a terrorist dreamworld? Or will a
last-second Red Alert turn the attention of voters to
the presidential column, or will that alert even be the
excuse for the Bush administration to postpone the
elections?
These and other rumors, theories,
fears, and end-of-the-Republic-as-we-know-it scenarios
have not just been flying around the web, but making
their way into the mainstream media. For instance,
Robert Kuttner of the Boston Globe and the American
Prospect magazine just wrote up three election scenarios
to fear, each chilling in its own way; while in a recent
column ("Fear of fraud"), Paul Krugman of the New York
Times, regularly on the mark, took out after the dangers
of touch-screen voting as well as Jeb Bush's
vote-vetting scams. According to the Times' David M
Halbfinger, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry
is taking the possibility of November 2 surprises
seriously indeed and is already ramping up his legal
teams to duke it out in battleground states where
results seem in any way suspicious. ("Aides to Kerry say
the campaign is taking the unprecedented step of setting
up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella,
rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers
associated with state Democratic parties ... 'A million
African-Americans [disfranchised] in the last election,'
he said at the NAACP [National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People] convention in
Philadelphia ... 'Well, we're not just going to sit
there and wait for it to happen. On election day in your
cities, my campaign will provide teams of election
observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will
enforce the law.'")
And while the administration
undoubtedly isn't holding Osama bin Laden for just the
right moment, there are more modest recent examples of
its willingness to go that extra mile down some dark
alley in its own electoral self-interest. Consider, as a
start, an interesting graphic recently posted by
Juliusblog. It combines the clever, ever-sliding Bush
approval chart at Professor Pollkatz' Pool of Polls with
the major administration alerts into a pattern that
looks suspiciously self-serving indeed.
Or take
the most recent Orange Alert, which came just after the
Democratic Convention as Kerry was setting out on the
campaign trail and was based on a series of arrests of
al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan, the first of which, Ahmed
Khalfan Ghailani, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's
22nd-most-wanted terrorist, was announced on the day of
Kerry's acceptance speech. To be more precise, it was
announced by Faisal Saleh Hayyat, Pakistan's interior
minister, at that top Pakistani hour for making crucial
announcements - midnight (but acceptance-speech day
halfway across the world). Actually, to be yet more
accurate, the arrest itself had been made not that day
but four days earlier. What's surprising here is not the
four-day lag, but the speed with which the announcement
was made - a kind of unseemly tip-off to any al-Qaeda
figures connected to Ghailani. As former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Robert Baer
commented on the timing of the announcement: "It makes
no sense to make the announcement then. Presumably,
everything [al-Qaeda] does is compartmented. By
announcing to everybody in the world that we have this
guy, and he is talking, you have to assume that you
shoot tactics. To keep these guys off balance, a lot of
this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit
from announcing an arrest like this."
All this
was explained recently by John Judis, Spencer Ackerman,
and Massoud Ansari in a New Republic magazine piece,
"Has TNR's prediction come true? July Surprised". They
add:
Last month, the New Republic reported that
the Bush administration was pressuring the Pakistanis
to deliver a "high-value target" (HVT) in time for the
November elections (July Surprise?). According to an
official with Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), a White House aide told ISI chief
Ehsan ul-Haq during a spring visit to Washington that
"it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any]
HVT were announced on 26, 27, or 28 July", during the
convention. When asked this week if the announcement
of Ghailani's capture on July 29 confirmed TNR's [The
New Republic's] reporting, National Security Council
spokesman Sean McCormack told the Los Angeles Times,
"There is no truth to that statement."
More
striking yet was the announcement that followed. As part
of the ramping-up of its Orange Alert, the Bush
administration announced that an al-Qaeda computer
expert and techno-whiz had just been arrested with
terrifying material on his computer, and then, when the
New York Times learned his name, evidently confirmed it
to the paper. The catch was, as Reuters recently
revealed, when Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan was arrested, he
agreed to turn double agent - and so became that rarest
of all creatures, a potential mole inside al-Qaeda. Soon
thereafter, his cover was blown. "'The whole thing
smacks of either incompetence or worse,' said Tim
Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defence
publications. 'You have to ask: what are they doing
compromising a deep mole within al-Qaeda, when it's so
difficult to get these guys in there in the first
place?... Running agents within a terrorist organization
is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have
it blown is a major setback which negates months and
years of work, which may be difficult to recover.'"
In this we certainly have a nasty brew of
remarkable incompetence and manipulative acts aimed at
helping George Bush get re-elected - the modus
operandi of this administration for at least the
past year or so. Can there be any question that the Bush
men would consider almost any scenario that might
advance their candidate's second-term fortunes? I think
not. But their incompetence shouldn't be overlooked
either; nor should we focus too exclusively on such
scenarios ourselves. In that focus lies a lurking
fatalism that has its own dangers. It leads to an
overestimation of the Machiavellian abilities of the
somewhat inept Busheviks, treating them as if they were
a comic-book cohort of X-men, superhuman in their
ability to grab fate decisively by the throat,
reorganize reality to suit their needs, and manipulate
the US public. In fact, if you think about it a moment,
the Bush administration has proved far less competent
since it tossed the Iraqi dice than either its top
officials or most of its opponents ever conceived
possible. And there's a surprise for you!
Whatever surprises the Bush administration is
planning for the coming months, it's hard to imagine an
administration that's been as regularly caught off guard
by events as this one. Reality has been biting back with
surprising ferocity. Among their manipulations that
haven't worked out quite as planned you would have to
include the front-loading of the economy (those tax
rebates now long gone) and the passing of Iraqi
"sovereignty" in a two-day-early June "surprise" that
managed to shove Iraq on to the inside pages of the
papers and deep into the nightly news for a month - but
in both cases (see below), reality shoved back in
surprising ways. Not only is there no guarantee that an
administration electoral surprise will work as planned,
but it's a reasonable guess that, of the surprises that
lie ahead, the majority aren't likely to fall Bush's
way. These could be a long three months for Karl Rove
& Co.
I'm sure all of you could come up with
your own lists of ways the Bush administration has been
and may continue to be ambushed, but here's a little
starter list of my own - 10 surprises this
administration proved remarkably unprepared for.
1. "Mission Accomplished". On May 2,
2003, Bush officials halted the USS Abraham Lincoln, an
aircraft carrier on its way home, some 30 miles off San
Diego so that the warrior president, instead of walking
up a gangplank, could arrive far more dramatically by
jet, mug with the troops, get photo-ops galore, and then
address his "fellow Americans" on the carrier deck
against the backdrop of a specially prepared banner that
proclaimed "mission accomplished". The first sentences
of his now-infamous speech included: "Major combat
operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq,
the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now
our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing
that country."
At the time, it was meant as, and
in the then-supine US media generally hailed as, the
crowning moment in a pre-electoral campaign guaranteed
to nail down a second term in office. Most observers
could already imagine the election-season ads (as well
as the pathetic Democrats slinking back to their holes).
So here we are only a year and three months later, a
mere blink even in political time, and every aspect of
this scenario has been ambushed. Hardly a bit of it
remains. The landing on the deck, so heroic-looking
then, proved in the end but a reminder of the
president's mission-unaccomplished Vietnam-era service
in and around the Texas Air National Guard, a record
that continues to dog him and has become central to John
Kerry's campaign.
As for that "Mission
Accomplished" banner, only six months later, the
president felt so pressed that he denied (wrongly) it
had anything to do with him or his administration. ("The
'Mission Accomplished' sign, of course, was put up by
the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that
their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed
somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff -
they weren't that ingenious, by the way.") As for those
major combat operations that were over, hundreds of dead
Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis later, marines
have been battling "hand to hand" with Shi'ite rebels in
the streets of Najaf in combat major enough to involve
tanks, helicopters and jets bombing in a major urban
area. The front page of the Sunday New York Times had a
photo of smoke and flames in Najaf with the caption:
"Battles yesterday between an American-Iraqi force and a
militant Shi'ite militia in Najaf left much of the
downtown area in ruins."
Most of Iraq, in fact,
has blinked off any map of US control and looks ready to
explode; America's Iraqi leader, Iyad Allawi, seems now
to be little more than the mayor of parts of Baghdad,
and as for that "reconstruction", here's a little
description from the Los Angeles Times of life in the
Baghdad slum of Sadr City today where jobs, electricity,
water, and most everything else remain in desperately
short supply:
Typhoid and hepatitis E are running
rampant through Sadr City this summer, as residents
rely heavily on a sewage-tainted water supply to
endure temperatures of 115 degrees [Fahrenheit; 41
Celsius] and up ... "If I showed you the water in our
house, you would not believe it," said Taiha Abdel
Reda, 45. "We turn on the tap and the water has a foul
smell and we see threads of [human waste] in it."
Those who end up hospitalized don't fare much
better. Nuwesri said his hospital often uses water
that's "just as contaminated as the water in the
homes".
The set of linked insurgencies in
Iraq that have driven the US occupiers to complete (if
violent) distraction may prove the greatest "May, June,
July, August, September, October ..." surprise in the
books. As the insurgency continues in one unexpected
form or another to drive the administration willy-nilly
toward the November polls, the story is likely to remain
at or near the front pages of US newspapers and the top
of the night's news. Between now and November, despite a
clear US decision to crush the Shi'ite opposition
immediately, things are only likely to get worse. Stay
tuned on this one.
2. Those missing jobs.
As Larry Elliot, The Guardian's economics editor,
reported (using a quote stronger than those found in
most US papers): "The 32,000 July increase in non-farm
payrolls - described as 'shockingly low' by one
financial analyst - was almost 200,000 down on market
predictions and led to a sharp sell-off in shares and
the dollar." This month's dismal job report, commented
Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen of the Washington Post,
"took administration and Bush campaign officials by
surprise. Bush's aides had been expecting a number that
several called 'decent'. Bush officials had been
reveling in Kerry's failure to make notable gains in
polls after the Democratic convention. The jobs number
abruptly ended the celebration." Talk about being
blindsided by reality.
The Bush campaign was
left with dueling headlines, as in the Post, that read
like this: "Payroll growth slows dramatically in July"
vs "Bush assures voters the economy is improving", with
the president still on the stump turning that corner.
Peter Preston, also of The Guardian, wrote:
Stumping 'round in the wake of Bush and
Kerry last week, I was struck by how strained the
president looks, and how thin his message sounds. Does
the tale of a million jobs created bring crowds to
their feet? No: especially after July, it shuffles
into silence. Tax cuts? You've had them. Add in health
and education spiels which might have been lifted
entire from his 2000 election manifesto and the rest
is tired rhetoric. "Four more years, four more years"
... It is not much of a pitch, and he seems to know
it. There's an anxiety about his campaign you can cut
with a Bowie knife.
3. The wimpy
Democrats turn into an opposition. This is clearly a
case of the vole that roared. After all, the Democrats
had been declared hardly even a party and written off as
dead back when Bush landed on that carrier. The
"mission" had been "accomplished", or so it was then
believed, as much against the Democrats (and the media)
as against Saddam Hussein. They had, until then, proved
incapable of mounting an opposition to anything or
discovering anyone who might be a "viable" candidate
against the president in 2004. They were without a hope,
a prayer, or any evidence of a backbone; and yet a
little over a year later, they emerged from their
convention (thank you, Howard Dean; thank you, Dennis
Kucinich; thank you, Al Sharpton) angry, unified,
determined to win the election, determined not to let
Florida or any other state be stolen from them,
determined not to be wimpified in some tank turret, and
determined not to be terrorized by a "war on terror"
president. If this wasn't a July surprise, I don't know
what one might be. That any Democratic candidate, no
less a candidate little beloved in the party (as the
T-shirt of a Dean delegate put it, "I am in an arranged
marriage with John Kerry") can be running slightly ahead
of George Bush in the polls right now is one of the less
believable events of recent times. But believe it. The
Republicans are starting to.
4. Oil
prices. Here's a genuine ambush. Remember when
early-summer oil prices peaked at about US$40 a barrel
and then were supposed to fall? The Saudis swore they
would make it so, but here we are with CNN posting
headlines like "Oil could touch $50" (a piece that
began: "When the price of oil crossed $40 a barrel
earlier this year, it generated nervous headlines and
anxiety on Wall Street and likely threw cold water on
the US economy. Now it seems that $40 a barrel may have
been just a step on the way to even higher prices, with
$50 or more a distinct possibility in the short term,
according to some analysts.") Oil bad news is coming
from every direction. There's the Yukos oil company
disaster in Russia; those endlessly sabotaged pipelines
in Iraq; Nigerian oil strikes; and who knows what else.
Conspiracy theorists could have a field day with this,
but my question is: Where are all those airlifted-out
Saudis when the Bush administration really needs them?
5. Leaks and memoirs. An administration
with a reputation for being the most "disciplined" and
"on message" in history, for keeping the press on the
shortest leash since Abu Ghraib, has suddenly found
itself charging madly into the valley of leaks. Starting
in the spring it seemed that every battened-down sector
of the Washington bureaucracy had sprung a few, while
former administration members began kissing-and-telling
directly on to 60 Minutes and so to the top of
best-seller lists: treasury secretary Paul O'Neill,
terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke, the CIA's "Anonymous"
(whose unflattering book just hit best-seller lists),
and the various leakers and interviewees to the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward for his Plan of
Attack, not to speak of Joseph Wilson's Niger
uranium op-ed in the New York Times (and subsequent
book). There was former Centcom (US Central Command)
commander Anthony Zinni denouncing the administration's
Iraq policies, former Pentagon official Karen
Kwiattowski denouncing the Pentagon neo-cons all over
the Internet, and various former spooks, military men,
State Department officials, and intelligence analysts
all spilling their guts. There were memoirists to the
left of them, leakers to the right of them ...
In the meantime, just when the administration
thought it had at least successfully set up its own
private prison system out there in the imperial darkness
beyond the reach of any court, including The Supremes,
beyond the sight, no less oversight, of anyone, it was
tripped up by modern technology - the digital camera,
e-mail, and the Internet - and a single reporter who had
done the same thing over in the Vietnam era. First, of
course, there were those high-tech postcards from the
edge ("Hi, Mom! Here I am riding camels and creating dog
piles. Wish you were here! Love ..."), and then there
was Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine running a
one-man leak brigade on torture in the provinces, and
then, of course, there were those administration torture
memos and reports that just began oozing out, and
then The Supremes jumped in ... drip, drip, drip
...
6. What if you threw a coronation party
and no one came (Part 1). At the end of July, just
after a Reagan (Ron) appeared before the Democratic
Convention to urge a November vote for stem-cell
research (and so for Kerry), Republican operatives held
out hope that Nancy Reagan would take to the Republican
stage in August in a kind of riposte to her son.
("Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie
made it clear today that he salivates at the prospect of
Mrs Reagan in New York.") But stories soon began to
surface indicating that she would not attend the
convention (and that the blindsided Bush team was teed
off about this). Though she has since pledged "150%
support" for Bush's re-election, she continues to
decline to put her body on the line for the president
who refuses to support her on stem-cell research.
Imagine, then, that the only Reagan who has entered the
electoral fray this campaign season has just written an
article for Esquire magazine titled "The case against
George W Bush". Talk about surprises, who woulda thunk
it?
Kerry has just seized the stem-cell issue
(and support for breakthrough scientific research) and
is launching a series of "high-profile events" around
it. "'This is an issue with legs,' said Democratic
pollster Peter Hart, who has measured 70% support
nationwide for embryonic stem cell research" - though
not so long ago this was assumed to be an issue of
little political use except as Bush administration red
meat for its fundamentalist base.
7. What if
you threw a coronation and nobody came (Part 2).
Robin Wright of the Washington Post revealed the
following: "The most popular Republican in the country
will not be speaking at the Republican National
Convention. The party's No 1 asset, Secretary of State
Colin L Powell, will not even be there - and may not be
in the United States, according to US officials"; nor
will Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, evidently, though
for different reasons, I would guess. Rumsfeld and most
of the neo-cons have simply disappeared from sight (at
least until a second term). Imagine, the man who was the
administration's top stand-up comic and general "stud
muffin" back in the good old days of Mission
Accomplished is now, perhaps by campaign fiat, missing
in action.
Powell is another story entirely. A
few months back, he suddenly announced that he was
pressing CIA director George Tenet (you remember him,
don't you?) to explain how exactly he had gotten all
that terrible Iraqi intelligence for Powell's United
Nations speech. It was, it seemed to me, a signal to the
rest of the boys at State that they could leak at will
(which, as far as I can tell, they proceeded to do). And
now, he's going fishing during the Republican
Convention! "'As secretary of state, I am obliged not to
participate in any way, shape, fashion, or form in
parochial, political debates. I have to take no sides in
the matter,' Powell told the Unity: Journalists of Color
Convention on Thursday. Powell was a featured speaker at
the 2000 convention and even campaigned with Bush."
Imagine that! Condi and he were the diversity
stars at the last Bush convention. But Sean McCormick, a
National Security Council spokesman, offered this
explanation for the absence of his boss: "By tradition
and custom, the national security adviser does not
actively participate in campaign or political events."
Remind me of the last time "tradition and custom" stood
in the way of Karl Rove.
8. Afghanistan.
America's 10,000 troops in Afghanistan having quietly
been upped to 20,000, US casualties are on the rise in
the land - and war - that time forgot. Two American
soldiers and their Afghan translator were killed and
another American wounded by an improvised explosive
device or roadside bomb (shades of Iraq) recently.
Meanwhile, in a grim sign of Aghan instability, after 24
years of continuous service through the worst of times,
the esteemed non-governmental organization Medecins sans
Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) has only now shut
down its operations in the country after five of its
workers were murdered. America's man in Afghanistan,
Hamid Karzai, is known as the "mayor of Kabul".
Opium-growing has outrun all bounds, warlordism is rife,
and a resurgent Taliban insurgency continues to grow in
the southern parts of the country (though registration
for voting in the upcoming elections is surprisingly
high). Events there too could ambush the Bush
administration any time in coming months.
9.
Things-to-come category (Part 1). Scandals, leaks,
commissions, reports, investigations: Don't get me
started. What if one or more administration official
actually gets indicted by the Fitzgerald grand jury in
the Plame case; or Hersh finally fully breaks that
child-torture, abuse and sodomy story in Iraq (with
soundtrack); or something really breaks on Halliburton
and the Veep; or one of the investigatory groups in the
Abu Ghraib scandal actually reaches up into the
administration and nails someone; or ... but the
possibilities are endless and there's nothing like a
wounded administration to bring them out.
10.
Things-to-come category (Part 2). What if al-Qaeda
doesn't strike in the US before November 2? I know it's
rash of me to say, but this might prove the real October
surprise: The administration doesn't find Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda doesn't carry out a domestic terror
attack before or on election day. September 11, 2001,
happened, as we now know in copious detail, because just
about no one was looking while those al-Qaeda operatives
and their "Saudi muscle" entered the US fairly openly,
trained for their flights, and bought their box-cutters.
But with people even half-looking, half-efficiently,
it's a far harder task to get that Saudi muscle in and
organize an operation in the United States. While I
don't discount the dangers, I still consider such an
attack unlikely soon.
So those of you intent on
October or November surprises, at least remember that
we're not the only ones they're likely to be aimed at.
As the Bush administration limps toward November 2, guns
drawn, wagons circled, ready for a fight, but unsure
over which horizon, from behind which rocky knoll the
next surprise may spring, keep in mind that reality's
the great white shark and there's blood in the water.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatchand the author
of The End of Victory Culture.
