Something Happened on the Way to Iraq

May 6, 2006

There was little choice with Porter Goss, who clearly had to go.  While certainly he can be assigned a significant portion of the blame for his abject failure at the job, he is not completely at fault.  While he alienated his new team with the imposition of non-professional political staffers to run herd over career senior CIA management, and while he sparred with his Director of Intelligence boss, that had parachuted in between Goss and the President, and while he whined in public about the challenges of his job and ducked his responsibilities to liaise with foreign intelligence chiefs, he was almost certainly doomed from the start by his political assignment to wrest the CIA away from presumed administration critic spooks suspected of undermining the President’s Iraq mission. 

Harbingers of Orwellian gloom and doom would point out that with the apparent ascension of Air Force General Michael Hayden to the post, the militarization of this nation’s intelligence services will be essentially complete.  However, it would appear more circumstantial than by design.  Perhaps Goss was to be a titular civilian figurehead in the intelligence services, stripped of power then divided by the other token civilian, John Negroponte, and Rumsfeld.  But Goss's taskmasters certainly never planned for him to fail so miserably.

America rises daily to new inflammatory news of conflicts and concessions all orbiting executive power, bungling, and command of loyalty.  The imminent flight of Goss and his Gosslings from Langley is only the latest unpeeled revelation of governance at one of its more asinine self-parodies of incompetence. 

The problem is not retired military brass.  The problem is not the CIA.  The problem is not FEMA.  The problem is not administrative and military leakers.  The problem is not Iraqi insurgents nor Iraqi foot-dragging in forming an effective government.  The problem is not journalism, the blogosphere, nor free speech.  The problem is not the price of gasoline, though energy policy is indeed central to even more overarching American challenges.  The problem is not Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Fidel Castro.  The problem does not reside with the authors of Game of Shadows.  The problem was not Press Secretary Scott McClellan nor is it Treasury Secretaries past and present, O'Neil and Snow.  The problem is not the emasculated and ridiculous Democratic leadership nor the demoralized conservative wing of the Republican party.

The problem is George W. Bush.

Something happened on the way to Iraq that caused the great nation of the United States of America to renounce nearly every good thing for which it has been an honored planetary standard-bearer for many decades and arguably since its inception.

While political analysts, columnists, and think-tankers may debate the fine points of whether the administration believed at the time that al-Zarqawi was being “sheltered” by Saddam Hussein, whether Geneva conventions apply to the enemies of the United States, whether domestic wiretapping at a time of war by executive decree supersedes the Domestic Espionage Act, whether the president has the right or not to suspend due process and habeas corpus at will for Americans swept up in its hostilities overseas and within the heartland, whether the President can leak information secretively at will and retroactively, or authorize torture in contravention to all precepts of human and societal dignity, whether the Vice-President actually needs an upland gamebirds stamp to hunt quail in Texas or not, whether the Department of Homeland Security is a bureaucratic train-wreck or just finding its feet . . . the ground of meaningful history is remarkably fertile.

As arguments rage by the American citizenry, the courts, and the mainstream media and blogosphere, in many ways all the diverse scandals and excesses of power are merely dots that when connected show the catastrophic drift in American integrity that began with the administration’s buildup to the war in Iraq.  If this war was indeed spawned upon Bush's swearing in and foisted onto the nation in the vulnerable moments following 9/11, history is likely to be particularly unkind to the sitting President of the United States of America.

It may be that the invasion of Iraq was not motivated by oil—though this has also not been discounted.  It may be that the war was not a punitive response to Saddam’s one-time plan to assassinate the President’s father.  It may not be an Oedipal fulfillment of what the President's father chose not to "fulfill."  It may well be that the invasion of Iraq was a well-intended, conceptually flawed, neoconservative doctrinal experiment to bring democracy and its example to the turbulent middle east and just went horribly wrong and blew up in the young scientists' faces.  If that's the case, fine, mistakes get made, even big ones.

Yet this was not the case for war made to the American public.  Nor was it the case presented to Congress for approval of war powers.  America agreed to sink unimaginable treasure and sacrifice our young because we were told that Saddam harbored both al-Qaeda terrorists and weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was a dire threat to American security.  The American people now know that not even the administration believed its own “terrorism angle” and aggressively ignored and suppressed a vast wealth of intelligence suggesting that Iraq’s WMD program had never been rebuilt from the Gulf War defeat.  It is almost secondary now what this war was really all about as there is no longer any doubt but that the President and Vice President and their advisors, for whatever reason, lied to the American people to get us into a war that has grievously hurt America and impossibly legitimized a troglodytic enemy whose ranks have since soared owing to legitimate global concerns about unchecked American militarism and demonstrated aggressions against all of Islam, everywhere.

On its way to Iraq, America shed its mantle of global decency and moral superiority and adopted one of tyranny, deception, international antagonism, and renunciation of its own laws and historically vital treaties to which it is a signatory.  Along the way, America has been obliged to additionally surrender its global military supremacy, alienated all of its allies, and has earned itself the global repugnance of a world that heretofore has shown mostly admiration and emulation.  Regime-change practitioners are careful and correct not to blame the American people, nor the nation as a whole.

Some have the discretion not to name the global poison a-dance on the world stage.  Others are less circumspect.  George Bush seems to be the universal consensus.

On its way to Iraq, America became the bad guy, and the real bad guys—America's terrorist enemies—have gained steady ground in the real war, one often invoked but only ineffectually prosecuted by the American leadership, the one for global as well as Islamic hearts and minds.  Charity, they say, begins at home.  This administration has lost the hearts and minds of its own people, and a greater calamity in international relations and domestic security could never have been achieved by even conscientious and well-funded evil-doers bent on the destruction of our way of life.

For the most part, the American people have not had been granted the opportunity of an informed opinion concerning the real issues in this nation's drift toward international malignancy.  We have reasonable expectations that our elected leaders will exercise their offices with full respect for our nation’s body of laws and will not lead us to an unnecessary war with a pack of lies.  We have reasonable expectations that our elected officials will not turn the most respected nation of the world into a global pariah nearly overnight.  Yet that’s what Team Bush has done, and it is the American people’s turn to have its say, and this time, the ballot box is not a sufficiently harsh arbiter for the egregious abuse of power the last few years have seen.

The impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney is necessary not to settle political scores but to reform the disastrous misdirection that our country has taken.  The cycles of consequence occur with such frequency in today’s wired world that America cannot sit on its hands and wait out two years of stagnation as the President serves out his term incapacitated by the nation’s distrust, hampered from the responsible projection of power over legitimate global threats, like Iran’s progressive nuclearization, or climate change.  The American nation needs a completely new direction, and if the Democrats do not take back the House in November, this country needs to place House Leader Dennis Hastert in the highest office of the land, in accord with this country’s constitutional order of succession.  Following impeachment for a succession of overt violations of American laws and for the cavalier stepwise dismantling of American security and international prestige, this nation must send the world the right message in the subsequent indictment and vigorous prosecution of Messieurs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and select colleagues for a long list of war crimes conscientiously undertaken for motives that have still not been explained to the American people.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.