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Monday, January 12, 2004

On the Mayberry machiavellis:  a theory (cough, cough) by me

Critics of the Bush administration have thus far been flummoxed by two things that just don’t seem to make sense in the context of the administration’s aggressive hawkishness: one, why have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gone out of their way to disregard and alienate the US intelligence community, even going so far as to blow the cover of a CIA agent who was working on WMD proliferation (of all things), especially when CIA/DIA intelligence is so critical to fighting against a stateless entity like al-Qaeda?  and two, how in the world can the Bush administration keep cutting services and benefits for veterans of the armed forces, while so drastically downplaying deaths and casualties in Iraq and refusing to acknowledge or attend funerals of servicemen and women?

I’m as flummoxed as anyone else, but I do have a suggestion.  Perhaps, for the architects of Bush military and intelligence policy, it’s all just another political campaign, full of the usual leaks and dirty tricks and backstabbing-- except that these people, from the borderline-Strangelove Cheney to the evil-boy-genius Rove, don’t actually realize the consequences of conducting military/intelligence policy like a political campaign.  Take the Valerie Plame scandal, for instance: if we were talking about Bush v. McCain in the South Carolina primaries in 2000, maybe this kind of thing would make sense.  Let’s say Joseph Wilson pisses off the Bush team by endorsing McCain-- OK, then, the long knives come out, and they go to a compliant press apparatchik like Robert Novak with some hot dope on Wilson’s wife, leaking the fact that she just happens to be a McCain staffer.  (Then, of course, they follow it up by spreading the word that McCain himself is really a gay priest with a history of sexual abuse.) But them’s the primaries-- you just don’t do this sort of thing in the real world where there are real consequences involving real weapons.  And yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cheney or whomever-- or, at least, it doesn’t seem to have bothered them-- that Plame was working on extremely sensitive matters involving the spread of nuclear weapons; no, the important thing was “sending a message” to Wilson and to anyone else in the intelligence community who might consider speaking out about the administration’s abuse of WMD intelligence in re Iraq, regardless of whether this actually damages our national security interests.  It’s just payback, the ordinary kind of retribution meted out by ruthless political machine hacks.

Likewise, with Iraq itself, I have to believe that the whole Project for the New American Century crew think of regional war as a large-scale version of board games like Risk or Diplomacy.  (Well, never mind Diplomacy-- that would involve dealing with Gerhard Schroeder.) That’s why no one in the Bush administration did any serious planning for the postwar scenario in Iraq:  in the board version of the game (the only kind most of these warlike fellows have ever played), you don’t need to secure the energy grid (or the museums!) or put together a police force or deal with massive unemployment, restive Islamist clerics, and guerrillas and their recruits sabotaging international agencies from the UN to the Red Cross.  All you have to do is roll the dice, move your pieces into the territory, and move the other guy’s pieces off the board.  In fact, I’m sure there’s an internal PNAC memo somewhere that says, “after we sweep through Baghdad and secure the Sunni triangle, we’ll move in those little pieces with the horses on them and a bunch of those cannon-things that equal ten units.  Then we can use our next turn to declare war on Syria.” (And so much for all the useful info Syrian intelligence has given us on al-Qaeda.)

And as for Bush’s treatment of our veterans and our wounded and dead in Iraq, well, here I have only a fanciful guess.  What if, just what if, Rove were conducting a kind of evil-genius (bwah hah hah hah) electoral experiment for 2004 and beyond-- to see just how shabbily a Republican administration could treat US servicemen and women and still pick up 90 percent of the military vote?  I know, it sounds loopy-- but then, I look back on the campaign the GOP ran for Senate in Georgia, and I have to think maybe it’s plausible after all.  Imagine that they’d said in early 2002, “Look at this Georgia thing-- now, let’s just see if we can run a Republican-who-avoided-the-draft against a triple-amputee Vietnam war vet, and challenge the vet on his patriotism.  Hey, if we lose, no harm done-- it’s a completely crazy-ass idea anyway.  But if we win? well, holy hypocrisy, Batman, if we win that one there’s nothing we can’t pull off in ‘04.” On that line of thinking, if a Republican White House can turn its back so callously to wounded vets who need long-term medical care and still win the military vote overwhelmingly, they obviously have that constituency locked up regardless of the facts on the ground, and they need never worry about it again.

Just a thought.

Posted by Michael on 01/12 at 09:22 AM
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