Duck Cheney's Dick Blind.  (01/24/07)

Not writing about an event as soon as it happens, when details are still fresh in your mind, has both negative and positive aspects.  Waiting for a few months or years provides an added perspective that might prevent one from sayings things that are not really relevant to the situation and tends to temper one's opinions with regard to the seriousness of the problem the event might encompass.  At the same time, however, precise details of the event itself might become fuzzy and obscured by the passage of time.  The issue here suffers a little from that since I cannot remember precisely when this event occurred, precisely where it happened, and who, if other than the two principle actors involved in it, were present on the scene when it came down.  It could well be that only two people know what happened, why it happened, and what it represents.  Neither individual is ever likely to confess or admit wrong-doing or impropriety; either one is perfectly capable of lying to conceal the truth, so it is not very likely that anything will ever be done to correct the situation the event created or revealed.

A primary reason for changing my mind about commenting on the event surfaced last week when I heard that the Justice Department, read here specifically as Alberto Gonzales, Bush's Attorney General, has recently fired at least six US attorneys considered disloyal to the Bush administration and replaced them with people characterized as cronies of Bush and his political operatives.  The reason for the action, according to people outside the inner circle of the White House, is that the insiders expect vastly increased oversight from the Democratic majority with the expectation and fear that criminal charges are likely to result from investigations conducted by Congressional committees.  The US attorney in each district decides what cases should or should not be prosecuted and having cronies of the administration in key districts will protect the administration both from vigorous investigation and from prosecution in cases where it might be warranted.  This is a pre-emptive judicial strike at justice being dispensed to anyone in Bush's circle who has broken the law over the past six years.  Gonzales, while refusing to say why any of these attorneys were fired, has asserted that no attempt is being made by him or anyone else in the administration to subvert justice.  Appearance of impropriety is sometimes the only thing you get when dealing with political hacks in the Bush administration.  Gonzales wrote memos explaining how the administration could avoid prosecution if and/or when it got caught torturing detainees in the war on terror.  He then denied he had written them and then, when confronted with copies of the actual memos, said that teaching people how to avoid prosecution for torture was not their intent.

The event I wanted to examine involved Dick Cheney (Vice President or President of Vice, as he is also known), Antonin Scalia (Justice of the Supreme Court), Cheney's Energy Task Force (2000--2001), and a Duck Blind at the southern end of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.  Whenever Cheney hunts bad things happen.  Maybe we only know that now in retrospect.  At the time I was only about ninety miles from the scene of the crime in Louisiana when it occurred (January 2004) and about that same distance from the second one, when Cheney shot his fund-raiser friend in the face while hunting quail in south Texas last year, having been driven from New Orleans to San Antonio by hurricane Katrina to be within 90 miles again when the bad thing happened when Cheney hunts.  As far as I know Cheney did not shoot anyone in Louisiana.  What he did do is fly his good friend Antonin Scalia from Washington DC to New Orleans at taxpayer expense on Air Force One so the two of them could go duck hunting together in a duck blind somewhere in the marshlands of southeastern Louisiana.  Ordinarily there would not be anything wrong with that.  In this case, however, it is first true that Scalia voted in favor of Bush/Cheney in 2000 and helped make it possible for Cheney to have Air Force One available for the hunting trip.  Secondly, Cheney had a case pending before the Supreme Court, which was decided several months later in his favor and with Scalia's vote, involving an executive privilege claim related to documents associated with Cheney's Energy Task Force efforts in 2001.

One of the elements that evolved out of the Energy Task Force were the windfall tax breaks awarded to oil companies that funneled billions of dollars of corporate welfare into their bottom-lines at a time when Exxon-Mobile for one posted $36 Billion of profit in 2005.  The House Democrats managed, against Republican opposition, to rescind most of those tax cuts in the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress.  Knowing what that task force did specifically is a right the American people certainly have since elected officials (Cheney, et. al.) did what they did while conducting the business of the people who elected them to do it.  Cheney's claim of executive privilege to keep those records and documents away from public scrutiny is an unsupportable argument.  The fact that a majority of the Justices voted Cheney's way and upheld his claim of privilege, in one certain case in point, can be traced to another secret meeting in the marshlands of southeastern Louisiana in Duck Cheney's Dick Blind, as I prefer to call it.

Another sidebar worthy of mention--for two years after 9/11 a contingent (task force) of at least 10 FBI agents and one federal prosecutor spent hours upon hours watching the comings and goings of private citizens from a house located on Canal Street in New Orleans.  The house was a brothel, of course.  For those two post-9/11 years, the activities of prostitutes was a higher priority for the FBI than hunting terrorists was.  I always wondered exactly how Cheney and Scalia got from the Orleans Parish airport after they deplaned in the city--did they detour to Canal Street before heading south to the Dick Blind?  Not that I'm suggesting anything improper.  Nothing much came of the big brothel bust.  The woman who ran it got a pretty light sentence because she threatened to publish her client list and no one wanted that to happen, including, if not especially, the FBI.

So, what about Antonin Scalia?  He refused to recuse himself from the Cheney case when confronted by the appearance of impropriety his duck hunting trip on Air Force One drew into public scrutiny.  He said he was offended that anyone would believe an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court would sell himself so cheaply.  That was his defense: I'm not guilty of selling my vote to Cheney because I would have demand a hell of a lot more than a trip to his Dick Blind.  I guess we can take some comfort from the fact that some of our public officials know the worth of their commodities and are willing to demand a fair market value for them before they sell out--to the highest bidder one hopes.

Late last week Dick Cheney gave an interview on CNN to Wolf Blitzer in which he said: "we've had enormous successes" in Iraq.  Understandably most people have questioned Cheney's honesty, grasp of reality, and sanity in making such a claim.  Some probably believe he falls far short of the positive side of all three possibilities.  I've been thinking about those kinds of Bush administration claims for a while.  They have always been incredibly optimistic in their assessments of the situation in Iraq.  In fact, as conditions there have progressively worsened, administration spokespeople have ramped up their optimistic statements.  Maybe the rest of us, those who are quick to question the sanity of various Bush cronies, are missing something.  For instance, what would it take in terms of how the situation in Iraq is assessed to make Cheney's claim not just credible but also absolutely true?  Most of us presume, since we are mostly decent people, that our objectives in Iraq are what Bush/Cheney claim they are: we deposed a cruel, savage dictator, were going to replace his government with a freely elected democracy, which would consist of a stable country under the rule of law that was unified, calm and peaceful to the extent that it would become a valuable ally in the war against terror.  Looking at Cheney's claim that we have achieved "enormous successes" in achieving those objectives is worse than laughable.  At that point in the interview, Blitzer should have asked Cheney to name one.  That never happens because the claim is so outrageously false that it generates no challenge, no follow-up, nothing.  There is something, however, that is relatively simple, if not simpleminded, that would turn the false claim we all see into its opposite.  If the objective in our invasion of Iraq was to create a blood-soaked killing field of rapidly spiraling out-of-control sectarian violence that led to a totally destabilized Iraq destined to become a safe-haven for terrorist, a failed state thrown into perpetual civil war, one that would persist for decades, then the claim of "enormous successes" would become incontestably true.

A fair question, of course, is why would the Bush administration purposefully set out to achieve a failed state in Iraq?  And what steps were taken to insure that outcome?  Reading about the war, the first step was going into the conflict without sufficient troop strength to prevent the looting that occurred after the fall of Saddam.  Rumsfeld's comments about it--"stuff happens," "democracy is messy,"--suggest total disregard for the chaos that ensued after the statue was pulled down in Baghdad.  What resulted from the looting was the total destruction of Iraq's federal government infrastructure.  Think of it this way--how is our government going to function if every building that houses any aspect of it is looted and burned to the ground?  Where are the federal employees who work for our government going to go to do their jobs if every work space has been destroyed?  Paul Bremer solved any problem that might have created with his de-Baathification order where in he effectively fired every federal and local civil servant in the Iraqi government.  A week later, more or less, he disbanded the Iraqi army.  People who have looked at the events of the summer of 2003, when all this transpired, have said that the war was lost in those first three months after Saddam fell, that the sectarian civil war raging there now is the direct result of those three decisions and events.  Were those decisions the result of incompetence?  If creating a free, unified, democratic government was the objective, certainly that is true.  Total failure to secure or win the peace was the outcome.  On the other hand, however, if creating a failed state that becomes a haven for terrorist was the objective, an "enormous success" was achieved.

 So, why make that US policy, what benefit is there to creating a failed state wracked by sectarian civil war and violence in the heart of the Middle East, as opposed to a free and democratic Iraq?  IRAN.  IRAN.  IRAN.  Iran is dominated by Shi'a.  60% of Iraq's population is the same; however, in the wider view, Shi'a are the minority in the Arab population.  20% of Iraq's population is Sunni and they are threatened by annihilation because of Saddam's forty-year reign of terror against Iraq's Shiite population.  The Shi'a are materially supported by Iran.  Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria are majority Sunni.  A broad-based civil war between Shiite and Sunni, if it becomes regional, will pit Muslim against Muslim for the foreseeable future.  While Iran might enjoy a brief reign as the most influential country in Iraq, the Shiite rage against the Sunni minority there will probably spill over into the rest of the Arab world and if a regional civil war evolved from that circumstance, the US would ultimately benefit through the destruction of Iran's sphere of influence being dismantled by the other Sunni nations in the region.  We can wage war against Iran by proxy if the other Sunni states do it for us in order to save the Sunni minority in Iraq from annihilation.  Whatever else might be true, this outcome would be an "enormous success."

One thing that is necessary, of course.  The US must build and maintain permanent military bases in Iraq to survive the civil war in order to sustain a flow of oil from Iraq's untapped reserves, which probably are the largest in the world at this point in time.  That is why Bush insists on "staying the course" in Iraq.  We cannot withdraw from the region if that wider conflict ensues because we are far too dependent on Middle Eastern petroleum-energy for our own survival.

I don't claim this strategy is a good one, that it is sustainable, that its success is even possible.  I do believe, however, that Bush/Cheney are perfectly capable of initiating it.  If anyone thinks they are concerned about the horrific loss of life their plan is likely to create, maybe they need to contemplate Katrina a bit to put that in its proper perspective.  If they are willing to allow an American city to languish in its destruction for eighteen months without lifting a finger to improve the quality of life there, a few million Infidels are a price of little notice to pay for Cheney's "enormous successes."