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Al Gore Speaks on Iraq
Monday, October 18 , 2004 at 12:30pm
Gaston Hall, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
I have made a series of speeches about the policies of the Bush-Cheney
administration – with regard to Iraq, the war on terror, civil liberties, the
environment and other issues – beginning more than two years ago with a speech
at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco prior to the administration’s decision
to invade Iraq. During this series of speeches, I have tried to understand what
it is that gives so many Americans the uneasy feeling that something very basic
has gone wrong with our democracy.
There are many people in both parties who have the uneasy feeling that there is
something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his
disdain for facts, an incuriosity about new information that might produce a
deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on
behalf of the country. One group maligns the President as not being intelligent,
or at least, not being smart enough to have a normal curiosity about separating
fact from myth. A second group is convinced that his religious conversion
experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical
analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups. I think he is plenty smart.
And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and that it is
an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me
and for many of you, most of the President’s frequent departures from fact-based
analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology
than with the Bible. But it is crucially important to be precise in describing
what it is he believes in so strongly and insulates from any logical challenge
or even debate. It is ideology – and not his religious faith – that is the
source of his inflexibility. Most of the problems he has caused for this country
stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the
right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of
large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for
its own sake is the original sin of this presidency.
The surprising dominance of American politics by right-wing politicians whose
core beliefs are often wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of
Americans has resulted from the careful building of a coalition of interests
that have little in common with each other besides a desire for power devoted to
the achievement of a narrow agenda. The two most important blocks of this
coalition are the economic royalists, those corporate leaders and high net worth
families with vast fortunes at their disposal who are primarily interested in an
economic agenda that eliminates as much of their own taxation as possible, and
an agenda that removes regulatory obstacles and competition in the marketplace.
They provide the bulk of the resources that have financed the now extensive
network of foundations, think tanks, political action committees, media
companies and front groups capable of simulating grassroots activism. The second
of the two pillars of this coalition are social conservatives who want to roll
back most of the progressive social changes of the 20 th century, including
women’s rights, social integration, the social safety net, the government social
programs of the progressive era, the New Deal, the Great Society and others.
Their coalition includes a number of powerful special interest groups such as
the National Rifle Association, the anti-abortion coalition, and other groups
that have agreed to support each other’s agendas in order to obtain their own.
You could call it the three hundred musketeers – one for all and all for one.
Those who raise more than one hundred thousand dollars are called not musketeers
but pioneers.
His seeming immunity to doubt is often interpreted by people who see and hear
him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction – when in fact
it is this very inflexibility, based on a willful refusal to even consider
alternative opinions or conflicting evidence, that poses the most serious danger
to the country. And by the same token, the simplicity of his pronouncements,
which are often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of
a complex issue, are in fact exactly the opposite -- they mark his refusal to
even consider complexity. That is a particularly difficult problem in a world
where the challenges we face are often quite complex and require rigorous
analysis.
The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish
and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a
phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and
genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to
lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and
their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion
and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what
rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to
the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick
Cheney said to Paul O’Neill, “this is our due.”
The central elements of Bush’s political – as opposed to religious -- belief
system are plain to see: The “public interest” is a dangerous myth according to
Bush’s ideology – a fiction created by the hated “liberals” who use the notion
of “public interest” as an excuse to take away from the wealthy and powerful
what they believe is their due. Therefore, government of by and for the people,
is bad – except when government can help members of his coalition. Laws and
regulations are therefore bad – again, except when they can be used to help
members of his coalition. Therefore, whenever laws must be enforced and
regulations administered, it is important to assign those responsibilities to
individuals who can be depended upon not to fall prey to this dangerous illusion
that there is a public interest, and will instead reliably serve the narrow and
specific interests of industries or interest groups. This is the reason, for
example, that President Bush put the chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, in charge of
vetting any appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Enron had
already helped the Bush team with such favors as ferrying their rent-a-mob to
Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots. And
then Enron went on to bilk the electric rate-payers of California, without the
inconvenience of federal regulators protecting citizens against their criminal
behavior. Or to take another example, this is why all of the important EPA
positions have been filled by lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst
polluters in their respective industries in order to make sure that they’re not
inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive
pollution. In Bush’s ideology, there is an interweaving of the agendas of large
corporations that support him and his own ostensibly public agenda for the
government he leads. Their preferences become his policies, and his politics
become their business.
Any new taxes are of course bad – especially if they add anything to the already
unbearable burden placed on the wealthy and powerful. There are exceptions to
this rule, however, for new taxes that are paid by lower income Americans, which
have the redeeming virtue of simultaneously lifting the burden of paying for
government from the wealthy and potentially recruiting those presently
considered too poor to pay taxes into the anti-tax bandwagon.
In the international arena, treaties and international agreements are bad,
because they can interfere with the exercise of power, just as domestic laws
can. The Geneva Convention, for example, and the U.S. law prohibiting torture
were both described by Bush’s White House Counsel as “quaint.” And even though
new information has confirmed that Donald Rumsfeld was personally involved in
reviewing the specific extreme measures authorized to be used by military
interrogators, he has still not been held accountable for the most shameful and
humiliating violation of American principles in recent memory.
Most dangerous of all, this ideology promotes the making of policy in secret,
based on information that is not available to the public and insulated from any
meaningful participation by Congress. And when Congress’s approval is required
under our current constitution, it is given without meaningful debate. As Bush
said to one Republican Senator in a meeting described in Time magazine, “Look, I
want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” At the urging of the Bush
White House, Republican leaders in Congress have taken the unprecedented step of
routinely barring Democrats from serving on important conference committees and
allowing lobbyists for special interests to actually draft new legislative
language for conference committees that has not been considered or voted upon in
either the House or Senate.
It appears to be an important element in Bush’s ideology to never admit a
mistake or even a doubt. It also has become common for Bush to rely on special
interests for information about the policies important to them and he trusts
what they tell him over any contrary view that emerges from public debate. He
has, in effect, outsourced the truth. Most disturbing of all, his contempt for
the rule of reason and his early successes in persuading the nation that his
ideologically based views accurately described the world have tempted him to the
hubristic and genuinely dangerous illusion that reality is itself a commodity
that can be created with clever public relations and propaganda skills, and
where specific controversies are concerned, simply purchased as a turnkey
operation from the industries most affected.
George Orwell said, “The point is that we are all capable of believing things
which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong,
impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually,
it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check
on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality,
usually on a battlefield."
And in one of the speeches a year ago last August, I proposed that one reason
why the normal processes of our democracy have seemed dysfunctional is that the
nation had a large number of false impressions about the choices before us,
including that Saddam Hussein was the person primarily responsible for attacking
us on September 11 th 2001 (according to Time magazine, 70 percent thought that
in November of 2002); an impression that there was a tight linkage and close
partnership and cooperation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, between
the terrorist group al Qaeda, which attacked us, and Iraq, which did not; the
impression that Saddam had a massive supply of weapons of mass destruction; that
he was on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, and that he was about to give
nuclear weapons to the al Qaeda terrorist group, which would then use them
against American cities; that the people of Iraq would welcome our invading army
with garlands of flowers; that even though the rest of the world opposed the
war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and contribute money and
soldiers so that there wasn’t a risk to our taxpayers of footing the whole bill,
that there would be more than enough money from the Iraqi oil supplies, which
would flow in abundance after the invasion and that we would use that money to
offset expenses and we wouldn’t have to pay anything at all; that the size of
the force required for this would be relatively small and wouldn’t put a strain
on our military or jeopardize other commitment around the world. Of course,
every single one of these impressions was wrong. And, unfortunately, the
consequences have been catastrophic for our country…
And the plague of false impressions seemed to settle on other policy debates as
well. For example in considering President Bush’s gigantic tax cut, the country
somehow got the impression that, one, the majority of it wouldn’t go
disproportionally to the wealthy but to the middle class; two, that it would not
lead to large deficits because it would stimulate the economy so much that it
would pay for itself; not only there would be no job losses but we would have
big increases in employment. But here too, every one of these impressions was
wrong.
I did not accuse the president of intentionally deceiving the American people,
but rather, noted the remarkable coincidence that all of his arguments turned
out to be based on falsehoods. But since that time, we have learned that, in
virtually every case, the president chose to ignore and indeed often to
suppress, studies, reports and facts that were contrary to the false impressions
he was giving to the American people. In most every case he chose to reject
information that was prepared by objective analysts and rely instead on
information that was prepared by sources of questionable reliability who had a
private interest in the policy choice he was recommending that conflicted with
the public interest.
For example, when the President and his team were asserting that Saddam Hussein
had aluminum tubes that had been acquired in order to enrich Uranium for atomic
bombs, numerous experts at the Department of Energy and elsewhere in the
intelligence community were certain that the information being presented by the
President was completely wrong. The true experts on Uranium enrichment are at
Oak Ridge, in my home state of Tennessee. And they told me early on that in
their opinion there was virtually zero possibility whatsoever that the tubes in
question were for the purpose of enrichment – and yet they received a directive
forbidding them from making any public statement that disagreed with the
President’s assertions.
In another example, we now know that two months before the war began, Bush
received two detailed and comprehensive secret reports warning him that the
likely result of an American-led invasion of Iraq would be increased support for
Islamic fundamentalism, deep division of Iraqi society with high levels of
violent internal conflict and guerilla warfare aimed against U.S. forces. Yes,
in spite of these analyses, Bush chose to suppress the warnings and instead
convey to the American people the absurdly Polyanna-ish view of highly
questionable and obviously biased sources like Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted
felon and known swindler, who the Bush administration put on its payroll and
gave a seat adjacent to Laura Bush at the State of the Union address. They flew
him into Baghdad on a military jet with a private security force, but then
decided the following year he was actually a spy for Iran, who had been
hoodwinking President Bush all along with phony facts and false predictions.
There is a growing tension between President Bush’s portrait of the situation in
which we find ourselves and the real facts on the ground. In fact, his entire
agenda is collapsing around his ankles: Iraq is in flames, with a growing U.S.
casualty rate and a growing prospect of a civil war with the attendant chaos and
risk of an Islamic fundamentalist state. America’s moral authority in the world
has been severely damaged, and our ability to persuade others to follow our lead
has virtually disappeared. Our troops are stretched thin, are undersupplied and
are placed in intolerable situations without adequate training or equipment. In
the latest U.S.-sponsored public opinion survey of Iraqis only 2% say they view
our troops as liberators; more than 90% of Arab Iraqis have a hostile view of
what they see as an “occupation.” Our friends in the Middle East – including,
most prominently, Israel – have been placed in greater danger because of the
policy blunders and the sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon
officials have conducted the war. The war in Iraq has become a recruiting
bonanza for terrorists who use it as their damning indictment of U.S. policy.
The massive casualties suffered by civilians in Iraq and the horrible TV footage
of women and children being pulled dead or injured from the rubble of their
homes has been a propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden beyond his wildest
dreams. America’s honor and reputation has been severely damaged by the
President’s decision to authorize policies and legal hair splitting that
resulted in widespread torture by U.S. soldiers and contractors of Iraqi
citizens and others in facilities stretching from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to
Iraq to secret locations in other countries. Astonishingly, and shamefully,
investigators also found that more than 90 percent of those tortured and abused
were innocent of any crime or wrongdoing whatsoever. The prestigious Jaffe think
tank in Israel released a devastating indictment just last week of how the
misadventure in Iraq has been a deadly distraction from the crucial war on
terror.
We now know from Paul Bremer, the person chosen to be in charge of U.S. policy
in Iraq immediately following the invasion, that he repeatedly told the White
House there were insufficient troops on the ground to make the policy a success.
Yet at that time, President Bush was repeatedly asserting to the American people
that he was relying on those Americans in Iraq for his confident opinion that we
had more than enough troops and no more were needed.
We now know from the Central Intelligence Agency that a detailed, comprehensive
and authoritative analysis of the likely consequences of an invasion accurately
predicted the chaos, popular resentment, and growing likelihood of civil war
that would follow a U.S. invasion and that this analysis was presented to the
President even as he confidently assured the nation that the aftermath of our
invasion would be the speedy establishment of representative democracy and
market capitalism by grateful Iraqis.
Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of
the doubt when it comes to his failure to take any action in advance of 9/11 to
prepare the nation for attack. After all, hindsight always casts a harsh light
on mistakes that were not nearly as visible at the time they were made. And we
all know that. But with the benefit of all the new studies that have been made
public it is no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of
political grace by the American people. For example, we now know, from the 9/11
Commission that the chief law enforcement office appointed by President Bush to
be in charge of counter-terrorism, John Ashcroft, was repeatedly asked to pay
attention to the many warning signs being picked up by the FBI. Former FBI
acting director Thomas J. Pickard, the man in charge of presenting Ashcroft with
the warnings, testified under oath that Aschroft angrily told him “he did not
want to hear this information anymore.” That is an affirmative action by the
administration that is very different than simple negligence. That is an
extremely serious error in judgment that constitutes a reckless disregard for
the safety of the American people. It is worth remembering that among the
reports the FBI was receiving, that Ashcroft ordered them not to show him, was
an expression of alarm in one field office that the nation should immediately
check on the possibility that Osama bin Laden was having people trained in
commercial flight schools around the U.S. And another, from a separate field
office, that a potential terrorist was learning to fly commercial airliners and
made it clear he had no interest in learning how to land. It was in this period
of recklessly willful ignorance on the part of the Attorney General that the CIA
was also picking up unprecedented warnings that an attack on the United States
by al Qaeda was imminent. In his famous phrase, George Tenet wrote, the system
was blinking red. It was in this context that the President himself was
presented with a CIA report with the headline, more alarming and more pointed
than any I saw in eight years I saw of daily CIA briefings: “bin Laden
determined to strike in the U.S.”
The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George
Bush was about the so-called Millennium threats predicted for the end of the
year 1999 and less-specific warnings about the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. In
both cases these warnings in the President’s Daily Briefing were followed,
immediately, the same day – by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the
White House of all of the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation
to prevent the threatened attack.
By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of
9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together
the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation,
and apparently did not even ask follow up questions about the warning. The
bi-partisan 9/11 commission summarized what happened in its unanimous report:
“We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11th
between the President and his advisors about the possibility of a threat of al
Qaeda attack in the United States.” The commissioners went on to report that in
spite of all the warnings to different parts of the administration, the nation’s
“domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have
direction and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened.
Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not
targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law authorities were not
marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned.”
We know from the 9/11 commission that within hours of the attack, Secretary
Rumsfeld was attempting to find a way to link Saddam Hussein with 9/11. We know
the sworn testimony of the President’s White House head of counter-terrorism
Richard Clarke that on September 12th – the day after the attack: "The president
dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said,
'I want you to find whether Iraq did this…I said, 'Mr. President…There's no
connection. He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a
connection…We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts…They all
cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the
National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong
answer. ... Do it again.' …I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't--
wouldn't like the answer."
He did not ask about Osama bin Laden. He did not ask about al Qaeda. He did not
ask about Saudi Arabia or any country other than Iraq. When Clarke responded to
his question by saying that Iraq was not responsible for the attack and that al
Qaeda was, the President persisted in focusing on Iraq, and again, asked Clarke
to spend his time looking for information linking Saddam Hussein to the attack.
Again, this is not hindsight. This is how the President was thinking at the time
he was planning America’s response to the attack. This was not an unfortunate
misreading of the available evidence, causing a mistaken linkage between Iraq
and al Qaeda, this was something else; a willful choice to make the linkage,
whether evidence existed or not.
Earlier this month, Secretary Rumsfeld, who saw all of the intelligence
available to President Bush on the alleged connection between al Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein, finally admitted, under repeated questioning from reporters, “To
my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”
This is not negligence, this is deception.
It is clear that President Bush has absolute faith in a rigid, right-wing
ideology. He ignores the warnings of his experts. He forbids any dissent and
never tests his assumptions against the best available evidence. He is
arrogantly out of touch with reality. He refuses to ever admit mistakes. Which
means that as long as he is our President, we are doomed to repeat them. It is
beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of
the American people.
We were told that our allies would join in a massive coalition so that we would
not bear the burden alone. But as is by now well known, more than 90 percent of
the non-Iraqi troops are American, and the second and third largest contingents
in the non American group have announced just within this last week their
decisions to begin withdrawing their troops soon after the U.S. election.
We were told by the President that war was his last choice. It is now clear from
the newly available evidence that it was always his first preference. His former
Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, confirmed that Iraq was Topic A at the
very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council, just ten days after
the inauguration. “It was about finding a way to do it, that was the tone of the
President, saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”
We were told that he would give the international system every opportunity to
function, but we now know that he allowed that system to operate only briefly,
as a sop to his Secretary of State and for cosmetic reasons. Bush promised that
if he took us to war it would be on the basis of the most carefully worked out
plans. Instead, we now know he went to war without thought or preparation for
the aftermath – an aftermath that has now claimed more than one thousand
American lives and many multiples of that among the Iraqis. He now claims that
we went to war for humanitarian reasons. But the record shows clearly that he
used that argument only after his first public rationale – that Saddam was
building weapons of mass destruction -- completely collapsed. He claimed that he
was going to war to deal with an imminent threat to the United States. The
evidence shows clearly that there was no such imminent threat and that Bush knew
that at the time he stated otherwise. He claimed that gaining dominance of Iraqi
oil fields for American producers was never part of his calculation. But we now
know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker and dated just two weeks to
the day after Bush’s inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was
ordered to “meld” its review of “operational policies toward rogue states” with
the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force’s “actions regarding the capture of new
and existing oil and gas fields.”
We also know from documents obtained in discovery proceedings against that
Cheney Task Force by the odd combination of Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club
that one of the documents receiving scrutiny by the task force during the same
time period was a detailed map of Iraq showing none of the cities or places
where people live but showing in great detail the location of every single oil
deposit known to exist in the country, with dotted lines demarking blocks for
promising exploration – a map which, in the words of a Canadian newspaper,
resembled a butcher’s drawing of a steer, with the prime cuts delineated. We
know that Cheney himself, while heading Halliburton, did more business with Iraq
than any other nation, even though it was under U.N. sanctions, and that Cheney
stated in a public speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999 that, over
the coming decade, the world will need 50 million extra barrels of oil per day.
“Where is it going to come from?” Answering his own question, he said, “The
middle east, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still
where the prize ultimately lies.”
In the spring of 2001, when Cheney issued the administration’s national energy
plan – the one devised in secret by corporations and lobbyist that he still
refuses to name – it included a declaration that “the [Persian] Gulf will be a
primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.”
Less than two months later, in one of the more bizarre parts of Bush’s policy
process, Richard Perle, before he was forced to resign on conflict of interest
charges as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, invited a presentation to the
Board by a RAND corporation analyst who recommended that the United States
consider militarily seizing Saudi Arabia’s oil fields.
The cynical belief by some that oil played an outsized role in Bush’s policy
toward Iraq was enhanced when it became clear that the Iraqi oil ministry was
the only facility in the country that was secured by American troops following
the invasion. The Iraqi national museum, with its priceless archeological
treasures depicting the origins of civilization, the electric, water and sewage
facilities so crucial to maintaining an acceptable standard of living for Iraqi
citizens during the American occupation, schools, hospitals, and ministries of
all kinds were left to the looters.
An extensive investigation published today in the Knight Ridder newspapers
uncovers the astonishing truth that even as the invasion began, there was, quite
literally, no plan at all for the post-war period. On the eve of war, when the
formal presentation of America’s plan neared its conclusion, the viewgraph
describing the Bush plan for the post-war phase was labeled, “to be provided.”
It simply did not exist.
We also have learned in today’s Washington Post that at the same time Bush was
falsely asserting to the American people that he was providing all the equipment
and supplies their commanders needed, the top military commander in Iraq was
pleading desperately for a response to his repeated request for more equipment,
such as body armor, to protect his troops. And that the Army units under his
command were “struggling just to maintain…relatively low readiness rates.”
Even as late as three months ago, when the growing chaos and violence in Iraq
was obvious to anyone watching the television news, Bush went out of his way to
demean the significance of a National Intelligence Estimate warning that his
policy in Iraq was failing and events were spinning out of control. Bush
described this rigorous and formal analysis as just guessing. If that’s all the
respect he has for reports given to him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why
he completely ignored the warning he received on August 6 th, 2001, that bin
Laden was determined to attack our country. From all appearances, he never gave
a second thought on that report until he finished reading My Pet Goat on
September 11 th.
Iraq is not the only policy where the President has made bold assertions about
the need for a dramatic change in American policy, a change that he has said is
mandated by controversial assertions that differ radically from accepted views
of reality in that particular policy area. And as with Iraq, there are other
cases where subsequently available information shows that the President actually
had analyses that he was given from reputable sources that were directly
contrary what he told the American people. And, in virtually every case, the
President, it is now evident, rejected the information that later turned out to
be accurate and instead chose to rely upon, and to forcefully present to the
American people, information that subsequently turned out to be false. And in
every case, the flawed analysis was provided to him from sources that had a
direct interest, financial or otherwise, in the radically new policy that the
President adopted. And, in those cases where the policy has been implemented,
the consequences have been to detriment of the American people, often
catastrophically so. In other cases, the consequences still lie in the future
but are nonetheless perfectly predictably for anyone who is reasonable. In yet
other cases the policies have not yet been implemented but have been clearly
designated by the President as priorities for the second term he has asked for
from the American people. At the top of this list is the privatization of social
security.
Indeed, Bush made it clear during his third debate with Senator Kerry that he
intends to make privatizing Social Security, a top priority in a second term
should he have one. In a lengthy profile of Bush published yesterday, the
President was quoted by several top Republican fundraisers as saying to them, in
a large but private meeting, that he intends to “come out strong after my
swearing in, with…privatizing Social Security.”
Bush asserts that – without any corroborating evidence – that the diversion of
two trillion dollars worth of payroll taxes presently paid by American working
people into the social security trust fund will not result in a need to make up
that two trillion dollars from some other source and will not result in cutting
Social Security benefits to current retirees. The bipartisan Congressional
Budget Office, run by a Republican appointee, is one of many respected
organizations that have concluded that the President is completely wrong in
making his assertion. The President has been given facts and figures clearly
demonstrating to any reasonable person that the assertion is wrong. And yet he
continues to make it. The proposal for diverting money out of the Social
Security trust fund into private accounts would generate large fees for
financial organizations that have advocated the radical new policy, have
provided Bush with the ideologically based arguments in its favor, and have made
massive campaign contributions to Bush and Cheney. One of the things willfully
ignored by Bush is the certainty of catastrophic consequences for the tens of
millions of retirees who depend on Social Security benefits and who might well
lose up to 40 percent of their benefits under his proposal. Their expectation
for a check each month that enables them to pay their bills is very real. The
President’s proposal is reckless.
Similarly, the President’s vigorous and relentless advocacy of “medical savings
accounts” as a radical change in the Medicare program would – according to all
reputable financial analysts – have the same effect on Medicare that his
privatization proposal would have on Social Security. It would deprive Medicare
of a massive amount of money that it must have in order to continue paying
medical bills for Medicare recipients. The President’s ideologically based
proposal originated with another large campaign contributor – called Golden Rule
-- that expects to make a huge amount of money from managing private medical
savings accounts. The President has also mangled the Medicare program with
another radical new policy, this one prepared for Bush by the major
pharmaceutical companies (also huge campaign contributors, of course) which was
presented to the country on the basis of information that, again, turns out to
have been completely and totally false. Indeed the Bush appointee in charge of
Medicare was secretly ordered – we now know – to withhold the truth about the
proposal’s real cost from the Congress while they were considering it. Then,
when a number of Congressmen balked at supporting the proposal, the President’s
henchmen violated the rules of Congress by holding the 15 minute vote open for
more than two hours while they brazenly attempted to bribe and intimidate
members of Congress who had voted against the proposal to change their votes and
support it. The House Ethics Committee, in an all too rare slap on the wrist,
took formal action against Tom DeLay for his unethical behavior during this
episode. But for the Bush team, it is all part of the same pattern. Lie,
intimidate, bully, suppress the truth, present lobbyists memos as the gospel
truth and collect money for the next campaign.
In the case of the global climate crisis, Bush has publicly demeaned the authors
of official reports by scientists in his own administration that underscore the
extreme danger confronting the United States and the world and instead prefers a
crackpot analysis financed by the largest oil company on the planet, ExxonMobil.
He even went so far as to censor elements of an EPA report dealing with global
warming and substitute, in the official government report, language from the
crackpot ExxonMobil report. The consequences of accepting Exxon-Mobil’s advice –
to do nothing to counter global warming – are almost literally unthinkable. Just
in the last few weeks, scientists have reached a new, much stronger consensus
that global warming is increasing the destructive power of hurricanes by as much
as half of one full category on the one-to-five scale typically used by
forecasters. So that a hurricane hitting Florida in the future that would have
been a category three and a half, will on average become a category four
hurricane. Scientists around the world are also alarmed by what appears to be an
increase in the rate of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere – a development which, if
confirmed in subsequent years, might signal the beginning of an extremely
dangerous “runaway greenhouse” effect. Yet a third scientific group has just
reported that the melting of ice in Antarctica, where 95 percent of all the
earth’s ice is located, has dramatically accelerated. Yet Bush continues to
rely, for his scientific advice about global warming, on the one company that
most stands to benefit by delaying a recognition of reality.
The same dangerous dynamic has led Bush to reject the recommendations of
anti-terrorism experts to increase domestic security, which are opposed by large
contributors in the chemical industry, the hazardous materials industry and the
nuclear industry. Even though his own Coast Guard recommends increased port
security, he has chosen instead to rely on information provided to him by the
commercial interests managing the ports who do not want the expense and
inconvenience of implementing new security measures.
The same pattern that produced America’s catastrophe in Iraq has also produced a
catastrophe for our domestic economy. Bush’s distinctive approach and habit of
mind is clearly recognizable. He asserted over and over again that his massive
tax cut, which certainly appeared to be aimed at the wealthiest Americans,
actually would not go disproportionally to the wealthy but instead would
primarily benefit middle income Americans and “all tax payers.” He asserted that
under no circumstances would it lead to massive budget deficits even though
common sense led reasonable people to conclude that it would. Third, he asserted
– confidently of course – that it would not lead to job losses but would rather
create an unprecedented economic boom. The President relied on high net worth
individuals who stood to gain the most from his lopsided tax proposal and chose
their obviously biased analysis over that of respectable economists. And as was
the case with Iraq policy, his administration actively stopped the publication
of facts and figures from his own Treasury Department analysts that contained
inconvenient conclusions.” As a result of this pattern, the Congress adopted the
President’s tax plan and now the consequences are clear. We have completely
dissipated the 5 trillion dollar surplus that had been projected over the next
ten years (a surplus that was strategically invaluable to assist the nation in
dealing with the impending retirement of the enormous baby boom generation) and
instead has produced a projected deficit of three and one half over the same
period. Year after year we now have the largest budget deficits ever experienced
in America and they coincide with the largest annual trade deficits and
current-account deficits ever experienced in America – creating the certainty of
an extremely painful financial reckoning that is the financial equivalent for
the American economy and the dollar of the military quagmire in Iraq.
Indeed, after four years of this policy, which was, after all, implemented with
Bush in control of all three branches of government, we can already see the
consequences of their economic policy: for the first time since the four-year
presidency of Herbert Hoover 1928-1932, our nation has experienced a net loss of
jobs. It is true that 9/11 occurred during this period. But it is equally true
that reasonable economists quantify its negative economic impact as very small
compared with the negative impact compared with Bush’s. Under other Presidents
the nation has absorbed the impact of Pearl Harbor, World War II, Vietnam War,
Korean war, major financial corrections like that in 1987 and have ended up with
a net gain of jobs nonetheless. Only Bush ranks with Hoover. Confronted with
this devastating indictment, his treasury secretary, John Snow, said last week
in Ohio job loss was “a myth.” This is in keeping with the Bush team’s general
contempt for reality as a basis for policy. Unfortunately, the job loss is all
too real for the more than two hundred thousand people who lost their jobs in
the state where he called the job loss a myth.
In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind related a truly startling
conversation that he had with a Bush White House official who was angry that
Suskind had written an article in the summer of 2002 that the White House didn’t
like. This senior advisor to Bush told Suskind that reporters like him lived “in
what we call the reality-based community,” and denigrated such people for
believing that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable
reality…that’s not the way the world really works anymore…when we act, we create
our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously as you
will, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too,
and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do.”
By failing to adjust their policies to unexpected realities, they have made it
difficult to carry out any of their policies competently. Indeed, this is the
answer to what some have regarded as a mystery: How could a team so skilled in
politics be so bumbling and incompetent when it comes to policy?
The same insularity and zeal that makes them effective at smash mouth politics
makes them terrible at governing. The Bush-Cheney administration is a rarity in
American history. It is simultaneously dishonest and incompetent.
Not coincidentally, the first audits of the massive sums flowing through the
Coalition Provisional Authority, including money appropriated by Congress and
funds and revenue from oil, now show that billions of dollars have disappeared
with absolutely no record of who they went to, or for what, or when, or why. And
charges of massive corruption are now widespread. Just as the appointment of
industry lobbyists to key positions in agencies that oversee their former
employers has resulted in institutionalized corruption in the abandonment of the
enforcement of laws and regulations at home, the outrageous decision to brazenly
violate the law in granting sole-source, no-bid contracts worth billions of
dollars to Vice President Cheney’s company, Halliburton, which still pays him
money every year, has convinced many observers that incompetence, cronyism and
corruption have played a significant role in undermining U.S. policy in Iraq.
The former four star general in charge of central command, Tony Zinni, who was
named by President Bush as his personal emissary to the middle east in 2001,
offered this view of the situation in a recent book: “In the lead up to the Iraq
war, and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence
and irresponsibility; at worst lying, incompetence and corruption. False
rationales presented as a justification; a flawed strategy; lack of planning;
the unnecessary alienation of our allies; the underestimation of the task; the
unnecessary distraction from real threats; and the unbearable strain dumped on
our over-stretched military. All of these caused me to speak out...I was called
a traitor and a turncoat by Pentagon officials.”
Massive incompetence? Endemic corruption? Official justification for torture?
Wholesale abuse of civil liberties? Arrogance masquerading as principle? These
are new, unfamiliar and unpleasant realities for America. We hardly recognize
our country when we look in the mirror of what Jefferson called, “the opinion of
mankind.” How could we have come to this point?
America was founded on the principle that “all just power is derived from the
consent of the governed.” And our founders assumed that in the process of giving
their consent, the governed would be informed by free and open discussion of the
relevant facts in a healthy and robust public forum.
But for the Bush-Cheney administration, the will to power has become its own
justification. This explains Bush’s lack of reverence for democracy itself. The
widespread efforts by Bush’s political allies to suppress voting have reached
epidemic proportions. The scandals of Florida four years ago are being repeated
in broad daylight even as we meet here today. Harper’s magazine reports in an
article published today that tens of thousands of registered voters who were
unjustly denied their right to vote four year ago have still not been allowed
back on the rolls.
An increasing number of Republicans, including veterans of the Reagan White
House and even the father of the conservative movement, are now openly
expressing dismay over the epic failures of the Bush presidency. Doug Bandow, a
senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a veteran of both the Heritage
Foundation and the Reagan White House, wrote recently in Salon.com, “Serious
conservatives must fear for the country if Bush is re-elected…based on the
results of his presidency, a Bush presidency would be catastrophic.
Conservatives should choose principles over power.” Bandow seemed most concerned
about Bush’s unhealthy habits of mind, saying, “He doesn’t appear to reflect on
his actions and seems unable to concede even the slightest mistake. Nor is he
willing to hold anyone else responsible for anything. It is a damning
combination.” Bandow described Bush’s foreign policy as a “shambles, with Iraq
aflame and America increasingly reviled by friend and foe alike.”
The conservative co-host of Crossfire, Tucker Carlson, said about Bush’s Iraq
policy, “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I
went against my own instincts in supporting it.”
William F. Buckley, Jr., widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern
conservative movement in America, wrote of the Iraq war, “If I knew then, what I
know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the
war.”
A former Republican Governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen, announced in
Minneapolis that for the first time in his life he was abandoning the Republican
Party in this election because Bush and Cheney “believe their own spin. Both men
spew outright untruths with evangelistic fervor.” Andersen attributed his switch
to Bush’s “misguided and blatantly false misrepresentations of the threat of
weapons of mass destruction. The terror seat was Afghanistan. Iraq had no
connection to these acts of terror and was not a serious threat to the United
States as this President claimed, and there was no relation, it is now obvious,
to any serious weaponry.” Governor Andersen was also offended, he said, by
“Bush’s phony posturing as cocksure leader of the free world.”
Andersen and many other Republicans are joining with Democrats and millions of
Independents this year in proudly supporting the Kerry-Edwards ticket. In every
way, John Kerry and John Edwards represent an approach to governing that is the
opposite of the Bush-Cheney approach.
Where Bush remains out of touch, Kerry is a proud member of the “reality based”
community. Where Bush will bend to his corporate backers, Kerry stands strong
with the public interest.
There are now fifteen days left before our country makes this fateful choice –
for us and the whole world. And it is particularly crucial for one more reason:
T The final feature of Bush’s ideology involves ducking accountability for his
mistakes.
He has neutralized the Congress by intimidating the Republican leadership and
transforming them into a true rubber stamp, unlike any that has ever existed in
American history.
He has appointed right-wing judges who have helped to insulate him from
accountability in the courts. And if he wins again, he will likely get to
appoint up to four Supreme Court justices.
He has ducked accountability by the press with his obsessive secrecy and refusal
to conduct the public’s business openly. There is now only one center of power
left in our constitution capable of at long last holding George W. Bush
accountable, and it is the voters.
There are fifteen days left before our country makes this fateful choice – for
us and the whole world. Join me on November 2nd in taking our country back.
#####
Read more . . .
John Kerry
defines his solid position on Iraq in a major statement
We
support our professional military force!
View a short video of Bush joking about WMDs
and hear the outrage from folks who have lost loved ones in
Iraq!
These short videos are now listed in a separate section of the
www.MoveOnPac.org website. You are asked
for your name, email address and zip code. Nothing bad will happen! I promise!
--Webmeister
View -
Stranded Republicans (for Kerry) Pretty good!
Bush is not a real "Republican"!
President Bush
misleads the nation
View -
Republicans for Kerry
Who
is John Kerry?
Environment
Nation's forests might be
on the road to ruin, by President Bill Clinton
Wilderness at risk from
new Bush policies
Steens management scandal may affect wilderness study
areas
BLM outsourced Steens Management Plan to mining industry leaders!
Owyhee River wilderness study area
inventory with ONDA
OHV vandals
charged in Yellowstone
Oregon's B and B
Complex fire closure modified
Senate says NO to Big Oil in Alaska
Gloria Flora - Environmental Hero
Re-introducing
wolves into Oregon
George Bush
overlooking the environment
Op-ed
Mark Fiore animates the Bush Roadless Rule
You will love this!
Mark Fiore animates the Democratic
Convention and this too!!
The Fox News conservative infomercial Outfoxed
Bill O'Reilly, Fair and
Balanced?
Fahrenheit 9/11
OpEd: Terrorism is a tactic, not an
enemy
OpEd: President Bush dumps the Hubble to lead us
to Mars
OpEd: President Bush
misleads the nation
OpEd: Unregulated OHV use is
being reviewed across the western states
OpEd: Badlands part of
BLM's recreation management area by Mollie Chaudet
OpEd: George Bush does not trust young
women by Ellen Goodman
OpEd: President Bush hopes no child will be left behind
OpEd: Off-roaders have no reason to fear Badlands Wilderness
designation
OpEd: Cell Phones Prove to be Critical in the Wilderness by Bob Speik
Road 18 Caves
by Brook Sandahl, Metolius Climbing
Road 18 Caves by Bob Speik, Oregon
Climber's Coalition
OpEd: Mt. Hood Wilderness to Enforce Solitude
Values by Bob Speik
Joe Eszterhas speaks out on Hollywood's responsibility for smoking deaths
OpEd: Blame For Bend Cable's
Info-mercials Depends On Who You Ask
