Deep Blade Journal

Deep Blade is rarely in the business of saying a kind word about US Secretary of State Colin Powell. In fact the very next posting will excoriate him for about the sixth time over the nakedly spurious charges concerning Iraq’s unconventional weapons he delivered to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003.

But this article by Michael Steinberger in The American Prospect (for the April 1, 2004 issue) gave me a small moment of sympathy through its description of the difficult portfolio Powell has been dealt. And I’m not referring to US relations with foreign countries.

Here is a small excerpt illustrating the point:

“…The caution flags, however, were ignored. When the secretary of state addressed the Security Council, he not only included the aluminum-tubes claim but made several other assertions that have since proven to be inaccurate. A performance that looked to be the high point of Powell’s illustrious career has now been thoroughly discredited and sits as an indelible stain on his record.

“Powell’s reward for doing the soldierly thing was a slap in the face to his department. On January 20 [,2003], just after Powell met with Bush and agreed to go before the United Nations, Bush signed National Security Directive No. 24, which gave the Pentagon responsibility for administering postwar Iraq. In retrospect, it was a tragic decision, one that needlessly complicated efforts to stabilize Iraq and that has undoubtedly cost many American soldiers their lives”.

The whole article is well worth reading.

Powell is an impressive, well-spoken presence–a moderate force in an administration of radical reactionaries run amok below a president with little respect for Powell himself and with little grasp of international issues. But Powell has lost every policy struggle and has no discernible power.

So Powell is a tragic figure. As a “doer” rather than a “thinker”, he is a functionary hobbled by his own liabilities and lack of “strong and specific” vision of what America’s role in the world should be.

“The neocons, for better or worse, had such a vision, and something usually trumps nothing”.

Even including the Clarke testimony, the mostly meager public 911 hearings last Tuesday and Wednesday leave me feeling that there is a big, empty hole that the Commission has no intention of filling in. Families who lost loved ones on 911, and the general public have little hope of having our substantive questions answered fully.

For the most part, including in the approach described by former counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, the 911 Commission chose to shine its bright light on unused chances to attack and kill Osama bin Laden. In this pursuit, commissioners have chummed around with a parade of both Clinton and Bush administration officials, while occasionally jabbing at their failure to act.

So there is a cover-your-ass veneer that shrouds most of the remarks of the Clinton and Bush officials who have chosen to testify. Mainly, the officials are ad nauseum repeating, “We took bin Laden seriously”; “We would’ve killed bin Laden”; “It was hard to find bin Laden, but we would’ve killed him if we had”; “We were on top of things and did everything we could, but we couldn’t stop 911″; “We couldn’t get the authority/support we needed to attack Afghanistan and kill bin Laden before 911 in the manner we could after”; “There was no mistaking, we wanted to kill bin Laden”; blah, blah, blah, blah.

Clarke is very different, though. I will save additional comments on the Clarke phenomenon for another posting. I have not fully worked out what I think about this obviously dedicated public servant and warmonger. He has certainly shaken things up and new reaction is flowing constantly as administration “attack dogs” saturate all networks in a frontal assault against him. But his expressed regrets for the failure of government that 911 represents are sinking in in a way that might just sink Bush.

The upshot is Bush is indirectly responsible for 911 for several interrelated reasons. He is dead wrong when he protests that “there was nothing he could do”. His family and business relationships in fact formed an indirect backdrop behind which the 911 hijackers operated–mostly through the tight nexus of the dynastic Bush family and the Royal House of Saud in Saudi Arabia–running right through the Reagan years and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

In no way do I suggest that there is any evidence Bush knew exactly what would happen on 911 before 911. That is the territory of conspiracy theory. But I will say this–there is more evidence that close Saudi associates of President Bush were close to the hijackers, and Osama bin Laden himself, than any of them were to Saddam Hussein. In fact, some of the president’s former business partners are bin Ladens.

Several books discuss this last point, including American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips; and House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties by Craig Unger. Mr. Unger gave an illuminating interview on Democracy Now! for March 18.

One last tip for the curious… The CBC documentary program Fifth Estate had an excellent one-hour installment last fall on fictitious 911 conspiracy theories versus the very real Bush-Saudi connections. It’s definitely worth the time to examine the website for this program.

I’m waiting for the day that the public begins to demand answers from Bush on his relationship with the Saudis. That’ll be the day we begin to learn what 911 was really about.

Meanwhile, I’ll just mention one of the most interesting thing I heard on the first day of hearings. It was in the testimony of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Armitage discussed the considerations behind the post-911 decision in 2001 that led the U.S. military to join with the Northern Alliance–our new Afghan allies who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996.

Here is some of his testimony on Tuesday March 23.

ARMITAGE: “… Now, the question of the Northern Alliance has come up several times, and people wonder why it was so hard to come to a decision. Well, beyond the drug dealing that they did, well, that caused us some trouble. Beyond the human rights tragedy that they inflicted in the 1996 time period, that took us a little time to get over.

“It’s not sufficient to be the enemy of our enemy to be our friend. To be our friend you have to share or be willing to at least embrace to some extent our values, and that’s why the question of the Northern Alliance wasn’t an easy one. It was a tough one”.

Image versus reality in the Bushian struggle between good and evil
Now let’s contrast these Northern Alliance considerations with the child-like protestations delivered by President Bush before a group of coalition-of-the-willing diplomats on Friday March 19.

“There is no neutral ground–no neutral ground–in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death….

“And we who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain of our convictions. We do love live, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, and freedom, and the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending….there is a dividing line in our world, not between nations, and not between religions or cultures, but a dividing line separating two visions of justice and the value of life.

“The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation”.

Obviously, as Richard Armitage points out, the whole matter is hardly so black and white as the president suggests. The United States has routinely partnered with killers, including Saddam Hussein and the murderous, drug producers called the Northern Alliance.

Bush gives a heartfelt, yet naive speech. But let’s not mistake his performance for anything other than puppetry controlled by Bush-family-connected corporate/national security elites who have seized upon the failure of 911 and turned it into a political tool in the quest to gather wealth and power.