Political Real Estate: John Kerry's Room With A View


By Ariana Huffington
June 30, 2004

Among the headline-grabbing disclosures from the Clinton Rock and RollRevival World Tour — ranging from the former president once dreaming ofbeing a doorman at the Plaza Hotel to his being on the South Beach diet —was a little noticed morsel in the Boston Globe noting that Clinton hasadvised John Kerry to "campaign as though Iraq was stable, the economy wasgoing great guns, and bin Laden was dead… concentrating on sellinghimself."

Thanks, Bill, but maybe you should concentrate on selling your books.That's got to be the worst advice given a presidential candidate sincesomeone told Mike Dukakis to put on a helmet and hop in that tank.

Of course, Clinton is just offering Kerry what has always worked for him:It's all about me, stupid!

And if you're Clinton — and it's 1992 — maybe that works. But Kerry's notClinton (which is not to say that's a bad thing) and 2004 bears noresemblance to 1992. Trying to get Kerry to be more like Clinton is liketrying to get Ian McKellen to be more like The Rock — it just ain't in thegenes.

The problem with Clintonism as a political strategy is that its namesake'spolitical gifts are not transferable — so Clintonism shrivels like apricked balloon without the outsized persona of the Man From Hope.

"How many Democrats," a Kerry staffer worried, "are going to look at Billduring the convention and think, he's still the best candidate we have?"

But while Clinton was, is, and will always be a better candidate thanKerry, Kerry has the potential to be a better president than Clinton — anda far greater leader.

The Roaring Nineties were the perfect era for a virtuoso politician likeClinton. The post-9/11 age calls for a candidate who can turn the focusonto the people he wants to lead — on their struggles and their dreams andtheir desire for unity and a better life for their children.

It calls for a candidate like John Kerry, who this week told thosegathered at a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference, "The stories of yourlives have become the work of my life. I am running for president to bepart of making your dreams real again. To fight with you in yourstruggles."

As I was pondering the divergent appeals of Clinton and Kerry over dinnerwith a friend, he told me the story of trying to sell his house — a smallbut comfortable home in Santa Barbara, Calif., with an absolutelybreathtaking view. He first tried to sell it with a flyer featuring aphoto of the house, but didn't get a single offer. He then swapped thephoto of the house for one showing the spectacular view from the porch.The house sold — for well over the asking price — within a few days.

The point being: You gotta play to your strengths.

John Kerry's house is fine. It's a good house, a house with a tremendousfoundation. But it's the view — his transformational vision for America —that will sell him to the country.

Clinton was all about sparkling fixtures and interesting decoratingflourishes — remodeling the Democratic Party with triangulation andrealpolitik touches. During his presidency, the pragmatic argument had itthat, with the country split, there was no appetite for grand visions,just for legislative knickknacks and policy odds and ends. The Cold Warhad ended, and we could afford to tinker.

But that was then. What the times call for now, and what Kerry must do, isgive the Democratic Party — and American politics in general — an extremepolitical makeover.

The good news for Kerry is that since Sept. 11 the country is in a muchmore sober mood — looking for a responsible leader who will remind us thatwe are all in the same boat together. Hope, community, inspiration andreal national security — as opposed to Bush's perpetual anxiety, fear,pessimism and division — are the features America's voters are in themarket for.
In making the media rounds, Clinton seemed to suggest that laying low is agood strategy for Kerry, whom he praised for showing "a certain reticencegiven the seriousness of the problems in the world today."

But Leader of the Free World is not exactly a stealth position. When youthink of the qualities that make for a great president, does reticencemake your top 100? Your top 1,000? Nor will reticence close the absurd gapin the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that has 51 percent of Americanssaying they trust Bush as their commander-in-chief, compared to 43 percentwho say they trust Kerry for the job.

Advising Kerry to focus on upping his curb appeal is badly missing thepoint, which is that the Democratic Party actually has a candidate withthe biography, the intellect, the heart, the chutzpah and the courage tooffer voters a stirring view of where we should be headed as a country.

If he does, I predict he'll be in escrow on the White House by ElectionDay.

Planet Reagan

Source: t r u t h o u t | Perspective
By William Rivers Pitt
Monday 07 June 2004

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

- e.e. cummings, "Buffalo Bill's Defunct"
Ronald Reagan is dead now, and everyone is being nice to him. In every aspect, this is appropriate. He was a husband and a father, a beloved member of a family, and he will be missed by those he was close to. His death was long, slow and agonizing because of the Alzheimer's Disease which ruined him, one drop of lucidity at a time. My grandmother died ten years ago almost to the day because of this disease, and this disease took ten years to do its dirty, filthy, wretched work on her.

The dignity and candor of Reagan's farewell letter to the American people was as magnificent a departure from public life as any that has been seen in our history, but the ugly truth of his illness was that he lived on, and on, and on. His family and friends watched as he faded from the world of the real, as the simple dignity afforded to all life collapsed like loose sand behind his ever more vacant eyes. Only those who have seen Alzheimer's Disease invade a mind can know the truth of this. It is a cursed way to die.

In this mourning space, however, there must be room made for the truth. Writer Edward Abbey once said, "The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads."

The truth is straightforward: Virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.

How can this be? The television says Ronald Reagan was one of the most beloved Presidents of the 20th century. He won two national elections, the second by a margin so overwhelming that all future landslides will be judged by the high-water mark he achieved against Walter Mondale. How can a man so universally respected have played a hand in the evils which corrupt our days?

The answer lies in the reality of the corrupt society Abbey spoke of. Our corruption is the absolute triumph of image over reality, of flash over substance, of the pervasive need within most Americans to believe in a happy-face version of the nation they call home, and to spurn the reality of our estate as unpatriotic. Ronald Reagan was, and will always be, the undisputed heavyweight champion of salesmen in this regard.

Reagan was able, by virtue of his towering talents in this arena, to sell to the American people a flood of poisonous policies. He made Americans feel good about acting against their own best interests. He sold the American people a lemon, and they drive it to this day as if it was a Cadillac. It isn't the lies that kill us, but the myths, and Ronald Reagan was the greatest myth-maker we are ever likely to see.

Mainstream media journalism today is a shameful joke because of Reagan's deregulation policies. Once upon a time, the Fairness Doctrine ensured that the information we receive - information vital to the ability of the people to govern in the manner intended - came from a wide variety of sources and perspectives. Reagan's policies annihilated the Fairness Doctrine, opening the door for a few mega-corporations to gather journalism unto themselves. Today, Reagan's old bosses at General Electric own three of the most-watched news channels. This company profits from every war we fight, but somehow is trusted to tell the truths of war. Thus, the myths are sold to us.

The deregulation policies of Ronald Reagan did not just deliver journalism to these massive corporations, but handed virtually every facet of our lives into the hands of this privileged few. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat are all tainted because Reagan battered down every environmental regulation he came across so corporations could improve their bottom line. Our leaders are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the corporations that were made all-powerful by Reagan's deregulation craze. The Savings and Loan scandal of Reagan's time, which cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars, is but one example of Reagan's decision that the foxes would be fine guards in the henhouse.

Ronald Reagan believed in small government, despite the fact that he grew government massively during his time. Social programs which protected the weakest of our citizens were gutted by Reagan's policies, delivering millions into despair. Reagan was able to do this by caricaturing the "welfare queen," who punched out babies by the barnload, who drove the flashy car bought with your tax dollars, who refused to work because she didn't have to. This was a vicious, racist lie, one result of which was the decimation of a generation by crack cocaine. The urban poor were left to rot because Ronald Reagan believed in 'self-sufficiency.'

Because Ronald Reagan could not be bothered to fund research into 'gay cancer,' the AIDS virus was allowed to carve out a comfortable home in America. The aftershocks from this callous disregard for people whose homosexuality was deemed evil by religious conservatives cannot be overstated. Beyond the graves of those who died from a disease which was allowed to burn unchecked, there are generations of Americans today living with the subconscious idea that sex equals death.

The veneer of honor and respect painted across the legacy of Ronald Reagan is itself a myth of biblical proportions. The coverage proffered today of the Reagan legacy seldom mentions impropriety until the Iran/Contra scandal appears on the administration timeline. This sin of omission is vast. By the end of his term in office, some 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted or investigated for misconduct and/or criminal activities.

Some of the names on this disgraceful roll-call: Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Michael Deaver, E. Bob Wallach, James Watt, Alan D. Fiers, Clair George, Duane R. Clarridge, Anne Gorscuh Burford, Rita Lavelle, Richard Allen, Richard Beggs, Guy Flake, Louis Glutfrida, Edwin Gray, Max Hugel, Carlos Campbell, John Fedders, Arthur Hayes, J. Lynn Helms, Marjory Mecklenburg, Robert Nimmo, J. William Petro, Thomas C. Reed, Emanuel Savas, Charles Wick. Many of these names are lost to history, but more than a few of them are still with us today, 'rehabilitated' by the administration of George W. Bush.

Ronald Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. The ground of many nations is salted with the bones of those murdered by brutal rulers who called Reagan a friend. Who can forget his support of those in South Africa who believed apartheid was the proper way to run a civilized society?

One dictator in particular looms large across our landscape. Saddam Hussein was a creation of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration supported the Hussein regime despite his incredible record of atrocity. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran to great effect. The deadly bacterial agents sent to Iraq during the Reagan administration are a laundry list of horrors.

The Reagan administration sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and assure him that, despite public American condemnation of the use of those chemical weapons, the Reagan administration still considered him a welcome friend and ally. This happened while the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran, a nation notorious for its support of international terrorism, in secret and in violation of scores of laws.

Another name on Ronald Reagan's roll call is that of Osama bin Laden. The Reagan administration believed it a bully idea to organize an army of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. bin Laden became the spiritual leader of this action. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States. Reagan helped teach Osama bin Laden the lesson he lives by today, that it is possible to bring a superpower to its knees. bin Laden believes this because he has done it once before, thanks to the dedicated help of Ronald Reagan.

In 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by Osama bin Laden, who used the Semtex sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration to do the job. In 2001, Osama bin Laden thrust a dagger into the heart of the United States, using men who became skilled at the art of terrorism with the help of Ronald Reagan. Today, there are 827 American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virtue, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him.

In the final analysis, however, the legacy of Ronald Reagan - whether he had an active hand in its formulation, or was merely along for the ride - is beyond dispute. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer. We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

Gore Vidal: The Last Noble Defender of the American Republic

By Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!.
June 08, 2004

Gore Vidal reflects on Imperial America, a place where the president can march through a dry forest starting fires.

Editor's Note: This is excerpted from the transcript of a June 4 interview of Gore Vidal by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Gore Vidal's newest book is 'Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia,' published by Nation Books, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group.

Gore Vidal is a national icon. He is the author of more than 20 novels and five plays. He is one of the best-known chroniclers of American history and politics and his works have been translated into dozens of languages across the globe. He once told a magazine interviewer, "There is not one human problem that could not be solved... if people would simply do as I advise." And for more than a half a century, he has done just that.

He published his first novel, Williwawa, in 1946 at the age of 21. He began writing poems and stories as a young teenager and began his first novel while he was still in high school. His grandfather was a senator and his father worked for the Roosevelt administration. But rather than pursuing a family career of politics and privilege, Gore Vidal dedicated himself to writing and critiquing the injustices of American society. Following the publication of the first two of his latest trilogy of books examining the American empire, Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America's last "small-r" republican. The recently published Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia is the third and final book of the trilogy.

Amy Goodman: In his latest book, Gore Vidal writes that "not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." He describes the current president as being like a man in one of those dreams who knows he's safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him. Gore Vidal joins us now in our Firehouse Studio here in Chinatown, Downtown Community Television. Welcome to Democracy Now!.

Gore Vidal: Thank you. This is probably my first encounter in the United States with democracy. And I've lived a long time. Here we are in Chinatown, in the firehouse, and I feel free. But we're supposed to in a democracy.

Amy Goodman: Well, we welcome you.

Gore Vidal: Thank you.

Amy Goodman: Why use the word, "imperial," in your title, Imperial America?

Gore Vidal: Because everyone hates it so much. I remember years ago, Time magazine, in one of its numerous attacks on me, on my first book of essays, which was heaven knows when, 30, 40 years ago, I refer to the American empire and things that we were doing that were not very good across the world, and I referred to the empire. And Time magazine dismissed me. It was an awful review. I pointed out that we had troops and so on in over 1,000 other places around the world. That seems imperial to me, but there we are. Ever since then, I have loved the word, because it just drives them crazy.

But we are a world empire, hated by all, and not to mention the least, our own people, since we don't have any money left for anything. So, you started to go somewhere and I had written about Bush that he's like a kind of crazy kid in a dream, and he thinks he's invulnerable, and he's marching along through a dry forest, and he's lighting matches, dropping them, watching the fires, dropping another one. I had always assumed, like all good Americans, that he was a hypocrite, particularly on religious matters. Suddenly, it began to hit me, he may be another Reagan. He may really believe these are the end of times. What difference does it make? The world's going to end anyway. Why save the environment? Save it for what, you know? We're all going to be upstairs as sunbeams for Jesus. If he's one of those--well, those of us who can afford it will emigrate, and the others will be with Jesus in a higher sphere.

Juan Gonzalez: You talk about President Bush throwing matches or lighting matches in the forest. Your book, I thought, some of the most powerful parts were when you go into all of the outright lies of the Bush administration, and you spend quite a bit of time on his Healthy Forest Initiative and his response to wildfires. Can you expound a little bit on this?

Gore Vidal: Well, part of imperial America is just sort of a list of the lies that he has told us, and there's a special law against people who lie to the American people, whether they're in the Legislative Branch of the government, Judiciary or the Executive, like the president. He has now told so many lies that he knew to be lies, and that we know to be lies about everything that he can be on, I think it's 12 counts -- he can be impeached immediately, without much fuss, if you had a majority of people who wanted to impeach him in the House of Representatives. Then we go on trial in the senate as poor Bill Clinton found when he lied about sex, which in my day that is what gentlemen were supposed to do.

Amy Goodman: Let's hear President Bush, just in the last few days, giving the graduation address at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

President George W. Bush: In 1944, General Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in the English countryside and wrote out a message to the troops who would soon invade Normandy. "Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force," he wrote, "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you." Each of you receiving a commission today in the United States military will also carry the hopes of free people everywhere. As your generation assumes its own duties during a global conflict that will define your careers, you will be called upon to take brave action and serve with honor. In some ways, this struggle we're in is unique. In other ways it resembles the great clashes of the last century between those who put their trust in tyrants, and those who put their trust in liberty. Our goal, the goal of this generation, is the same. We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom.

Amy Goodman: President Bush speaking at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. President Bush comparing the conflict in Iraq to World War II. Today he's headed to Normandy. He just met with the Pope this morning on the anniversary of D-day. Your response, Gore Vidal?

Gore Vidal: Well, I'd like to be a fly on that wall where he meets the Pope, who highly disapproves of our imperial mission around the world. The Pope, although he's generally interested in sex only, (that is part of the Roman Catholic doctrine of power over the individual) the Pope is a good guy on matters of war and peace. He doesn't like war, and he doesn't like Bush. He doesn't like the United States at this moment. So, I would think that was a very chilling meeting between the two of them. It was chilly when Ronald Reagan went to see him, but Reagan went to sleep, and it was a wonderful meeting, you know. The pope said a few prayers, and there was Ron, snoring softly, and everybody was saying in a very - "it's been a very long trip, you know, from America here." And there's Reagan, sound asleep in front of all of the cameras. But to compare the preemptive wars of Mr. Bush, which are totally illegal, which offend -- if I may paraphrase Thomas Jefferson -- the decent opinion of mankind. The entire world is horrified by what we do. He goes into an innocent country called Afghanistan, knocks it down. One of his cabinet members knocks it down. Then he gives contracts to rebuild it to his vice president with Halliburton. Then he knocks down another country which has done nothing to us.

Juan Gonzalez: One of the big sections in your book is a privatizing of the American elections. Many people have almost forgotten Florida already, but we're now in a new year, a new election year, and already as we reported earlier on the show, CNN has sued the state of Florida to try to get the list of the newest list of felons about to be purged from the rolls in Florida. You have a lot to say about what will -- what could possibly happen with these elections, and what we, the nation, still have not dealt with about the last election?

Gore Vidal: Well, the sinister thing -- or certainly a sinister thing has been the privatizing of the elections, outsourcing, to use the latest catch phrase, is that for some time now people have been dissatisfied with the dangling chads and so on. There's a special act of Congress calling for a lot of money to be spent in order to bring up to date the voting machinery. It's touch screen stuff. It's supposed to be very popular with the voters. Well, it's the most easily corrupted of all, because you touch the screen, and you vote for Kerry, and then your vote suddenly is transformed almost immediately, and there's no track of it ever registering anywhere but in the hearts of heaven.

I go into great detail in the course of Imperial America into how three companies have absolutely got hold of the voting machinery, and Diebold, is the number one, and in the state of California where I am living, at least the California legislature backed them up and said in Orange County, which is one of the largest counties in L.A. during the recall election, recently something like 7,000 votes -- nobody can track them. There is no record that you voted. They call it a paper trail.

The head of Diebold, which is the number one manufacturer of these machines, is on record as saying he's a working Republican, and he's already written a fundraising letter to the voters of Ohio, which is a swing state, saying, well, I'll do everything I can to make sure that Ohio votes for President Bush. Well, noble partisanship and we're a free country. You can work for anybody who you want to, but don't make the machines, and don't make them unaccountable.

Absolutely it's difficult to find what goes on in these machines. So, in California, the legislature has already asked them to re-examine, and perhaps get rid of them, but you see, I mean, November is almost here. They're all over Georgia. They're all over Maryland. You could well lose the election if you had friends in high places with the three companies that produced these machines. You can change the election. Everybody could vote for Kerry, and suddenly, there is Bush once again, an unelected President, but serving his time and quacking away. You know, as though he were the real thing. Wartime President. I'm a wartime President.

Why, if we had any media in the country that was honest, and we don't, somebody would have pointed out this is not wartime. You cannot have a war without a declaration. Article two of the Constitution of the United States declaring war, and that should be the House of Representatives. That is the law of the land. He said, "I'm a wartime President." well, good for him, but he isn't. There's no war except what he has declared. That's on Afghanistan and what he has declared on Iraq. There is no war, and why they don't stop him right there. I'd switch him right off the air. I would have the voice going, President Bush is under a misapprehension that we are at war. We are not at war. He is at war.

I spent three years in World War II. I never heard President Roosevelt say -- "I'm going to send troops to China. And I will then send them to Southeast Asia." President Roosevelt never said "I." We. We are the United States. We will do this. All together with our allies. We will do this. So, it's "I." I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. How a fool like this can be tolerated in a country whose median I.Q. cannot be much lower than that of Inner Slovenia, that they allow him to say ridiculous things and get away with it. I have never felt the country is so naked as it is now. There is no official voice. There is no representative government. Congress doesn't represent anybody. And the Supreme Court, I must say, why some of them are not in jail, I don't know. But be that as it may, to strike a happy note -

Amy Goodman: What can people do now? You have described grave problems. Elections being stolen. A war not declared, but engaged in.

Gore Vidal: I should think if there were a great and eloquent voice opposite to that of Bush -- in other words, if Kerry could only take off and start to say the things that I have been saying somewhat light heartedly, if he could say them a bit more heavy heartedly, then would you have an opposition and then would you have a big turnout. You might have a real vote going on. It wasn't until I watched, to my amazement, my cousin Albert Gore give that wonderful speech up at N.Y.U. was it? He sounded -- you know, the Gore blood. I'm making no pun, but the Gore blood was at last rippling.

Suddenly, there he is up there at N.Y.U. And he sounds like a President we didn't get. I mean, he was elected President, and I think this bothers George W. Bush every day, if somebody told you about it. I have a funny feeling that he doesn't know that he lost the election. Because he sounds so confident. I think he thought he was elected by a landslide, you know. Anything he wants to do, he can do. Because I'm a wartime President.

Amy Goodman: The 9/11 commission report?

Gore Vidal: Well, the 9/11, I haven't heard any final -- there's no final report yet.

Amy Goodman: No, no. There isn't. But in terms of the kind of investigation that we have seen.

Gore Vidal: I'm astonished that they allowed anything, and then I was not in the least surprised that urgent questions were not really asked or answered. I mean, it's better than nothing. I mean, you know, we only get a tiny bone of democracy. I can say that on this program, which is dedicated to democracy. Incidentally, for your listeners, viewers, the word "democracy" is not only never mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, but democracy was something that the founding fathers hated. This is not generally known because it shouldn't be known, but it is. I wrote a little book about it called, "Inventing A Nation," that Yale published last year. Our founders feared two things. One was the rule of the people, which they thought would just be a mess. And they feared tyranny, which we had gone through King George III, and so they wanted a republic, a safe place for men -- white men of property to do business in. This is not ideal, but it's better than what we have.

So, here we are bringing democracy to the poor Afghans, but only real democracy, of course, is in the prisons, which we have specialized in everywhere. One interesting thing that came out of all of that mess was now the world knows how we treat Americans in American prisons. All of that behavior, the humiliation and violence and so on, that is typical of not so much -- of federal prisons somewhat, but state prisons, municipal prisons, detention centers. This is the nation of torture, and those who disagree with me, you can write an angry letter at this very moment, if you can write at all. Sit down and write an angry letter to the Commander In Chief. Have him examine the prisons.

Amy Goodman: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Gore Vidal.

Gore Vidal: I just barely started. [laughs]

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program Democracy Now.

Oil Slick Jim Moves In, "Best Democracy Money Can Buy"

Source: From the new Expanded Election Edition of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Plume).
By Greg Palast
June 4, 2004

I avoid the New York Times but lately, it's become a compulsion, though only for the new daily column titled, "Names of the Dead." Today's listing: "DERVISHI, Ervin, 21, Pfc, Army. Fort Worth."

I'm not one of those cynical people who thought Bush sent us into to Iraq for the oil. To me, Saddam Hussein was always a Kurd-killing cockroach with a Hitlerian mustache. I never liked the guy - not even when he worked for George Bush Sr.

It's worth going over the work the Butcher of Baghdad did for his Texas patrons when he was theirbutcher:

1979: Seizes power with US approval; moves allegiance from Soviets to USA in Cold War.

1980: Invades Iran, then the "Unicycle of Evil," with US encouragement and arms. (In fairness, credit here goes to Nobel Peace Laureate, James Carter.)

1982: Bush-Reagan regime removes Saddam's regime from official US list of state sponsors of terrorism.

1983: Saddam hosts Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad. Agrees to "go steady" with US corporate suppliers.

1984: US Commerce Department issues license for export ofaflatoxin to Iraq useable in biological weapons.

1988: Kurds in Halabja, Iraq, gassed.

1987-88: US warships destroy Iranian oil platforms in Gulf and break Iranian blockade of Iraq shipping lanes, tipping war advantage back to Saddam.

1990: Invades Kuwait with US permission.

US permission? On July 25, 1990, the dashing dictator met in Baghdad with US Ambassador April Glaspie. When Saddam asked Glaspie if the US would object to an attack on Kuwait over the small emirate's theft of Iraqi oil, America's Ambassador told him, "We have no opinion…. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction ... that Kuwait is not associated with America." Saddam taped her.

Glaspie, in 1991 Congressional testimony, did not deny the authenticity of the recording which diplomats worldwide took as a Bush Sr's OK to an Iraqi invasion.

So where is Secretary Baker today? On the lam, hiding in deserved shame? Doing penance by nursing the victims of Gulf War Syndrome? No, Mr. Baker is a successful lawyer, founder of Baker Botts of Houston, Riyadh, Kazakhstan. Among his glinting client roster, Exxon-Mobil oil and the defense minister of Saudi Arabia. Baker's firm is protecting the Saudi royal from a lawsuit by the families of the victims of September 11 over evidence suggesting that Saudi money ended up in the pockets of the terrorists.

And Baker has just opened a new office … at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This is White House first: the first time a lobbyist for the oil industry will have a desk right next to the President's. Baker's job, to "restructure" Iraq's debt. How lucky for his clients in Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq. Apparently this includes their $7 billion send to Saddam to fund his bomb [see Chapter 2].

If you remember, Henry Kissinger ran away from appointment to the September 11 Commission with his consulting firm tucked between his legs after the US Senate demanded he reveal his client list. In the case of Jim Baker, our elected Congress will had no chance to ask him who is paying his firm nor even require him to get off conflicting payrolls.

To get around the wee issue of conflicts galore, the White House crafted a neat little subterfuge. The official press release says the President has not appointed Mr. Baker. Rather Mr. Bush is "responding to a request from the Iraqi Governing Council." That is, Bush is acting on the authority of the puppet government he imposed on Iraqis at gunpoint.

Why is our President so concerned with the wishes of Mr. Baker's clientele? What does Bush owe Baker?

It was Baker, as consiglieri to the Bush family, who came up with the strategy of maneuvering the 2000 Florida vote count into a Supreme Court packed with politicos.

Over the years, Jim Baker has taken responsibility for putting bread on the Bush family table. As Senior Counsel to Carlyle, the arms-dealing investment group, Baker arranged for the firm to hire bothPresident Bush 41 after he was booted from the White House and President Bush 43 while his daddy was still in office.

We know why Jim Baker is in the White House. But what was Private Dervishi doing in harm's way in Iraq? Saddam was already in the slammer and Iraq "liberated" nearly a year.

The answer came to me in a confidential document that oozed out of Foggy Bottom, one hundred pages from the State Departments secret "Iraq Strategy." It's all about the "post-conflict" economy of Iraq written well beforeAmerican was told we would have a conflict there.

There's nothing in the "Iraq Strategy" about democracy or voting. But there's plenty of detail about creating a free-market Disneyland in Mesopotamia, with "all" state assets - and that's just about everything in that nation - to be sold off to corporate powers. The Bush team secret program ordered …

"…asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially those in the oil and supporting industries."

The "Strategy" lays out a detailed 270-day schedule for the asset grab. And that's why PFC Dervishi was kept there: to prevent or forestall elections. Because no democratically elected government of Iraq could ever sell off its oil. Democracy would have to wait, at the point of a gun, for the "assets sales, concessions, leases" to Bush's corporate buck-buddies.

There you have it. The secret "Strategy" tells us that, if Bush didn't go into Iraq for the oil, he sure as hell ain't leaving without it.