June 8, 2006
Sidney Blumenthal: George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld
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"The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. The current president had previously rejected entreaties from party establishment figures to revamp his administration with new appointments. There was no one left to approach him except his father. This effort to pluck George W. from his troubles is the latest episode in a recurrent drama -- from the drunken young man challenging his father to go "mano a mano" on the front lawn of the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to the father pulling strings to get the son into the Texas Air National Guard and helping salvage his finances from George W.'s mismanagement of Harken Energy. For the father, parental responsibility never ends. But for the son, rebellion continues. When journalist Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."The former president, a practitioner of foreign policy realism, was intruding on the president's parallel reality. But the realist was trying to shake the fantasist in vain. "The president believes the talking points he's given and repeats on progress in Iraq," a Bush administration national security official told me. Bush redoubles his efforts, projects his firmness, in the conviction that the critics lack his deeper understanding of Iraq that allows him to see through the fog of war to the Green Zone as a city on a hill...
...Before the Iraq war, the administration received and dismissed warnings of the dangers of a prolonged occupation from the State Department, the CIA and the military. A month before the invasion, in February 2003, the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute published a paper by a team of its experts, "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario." Civil war, sectarian militias, anarchy, suicide bombers and widespread insurgency -- if there was a lengthy occupation -- were predicted: "Ethnic, tribal, and religious schisms could produce civil war or fracture the state after Saddam is deposed ... The longer a U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, the more danger exists that elements of the Iraqi population will become impatient and take violent measures to hasten the departure of U.S. forces." But the Bush administration simply ignored this cautionary analysis. Among the report's cogent warnings was that insurgents could incite violence to provoke repression, forcing U.S. troops into an uncontrollable "action-reaction cycle." Nearly three years after the invasion, the Marines in Haditha were apparently caught up in that whirlwind...
...Haditha is a symptom of the fallacy of Bush's military solution. The alleged massacre occurred after the administration's dismissal of repeated warnings about the awful pressures on an army of occupation against an insurgency. Conflating a population that broadly supports an insurgency with a terrorist enemy and indoctrinating the troops with a sense of revenge for Sept. 11 easily leads to an erasure of the distinction between military and civilian targets. Once again, a commander in chief has failed to learn the lessons of Algeria and Vietnam.
Bush's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions has set an example that in this unique global war on terror, in order to combat those who do not follow the rules of war, we must also abandon those rules. This week a conflict has broken out in the Pentagon over Rumsfeld's proposed revision of the Army Field Manual for interrogation of prisoners, which would excise Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions that forbids "humiliating and degrading treatment." And, this week, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., proposed a bill that would make the administration provide "a full accounting on any clandestine prison or detention facility currently or formerly operated by the United States Government, regardless of location, where detainees in the global war on terrorism are or were being held," the number of detainees, and a "description of the interrogation procedures used or formerly used on detainees at such prison or facility and a determination, in coordination with other appropriate officials, on whether such procedures are or were in compliance with United States obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture." The administration vigorously opposes the bill..."
Posted by fightingdem at June 8, 2006 8:14 AM
