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Coup d’état in Washington?
BY JORGE CAMIL —
Taken from La Jornada —
WHEN
I finally read The Price of Loyalty by Ron
Suskind, I understood why it had caused such a
sensation among political analysts in the United
States. Based on the revelations of Paul O’Neill,
George W. Bush’s first treasury secretary, and on
documents he kept after resigning from the post, the
book is a devastating testimony against the current
administration. After the first 100 pages (there are
331 in all), the reader is left in no doubt that
executive power is exercised by a reduced group of
neo-conservatives led by Dick Cheney, with the
knowledge and understanding of a president that is
neither aware of nor understands (and probably is
not interested anyway) issues on the national and
international agenda.
In
O’Neill’s account, Bush appears as a man without
substance, ideas, programs, ignorant of the
realities and historical background of U.S. society;
a hick who doesn’t read (not even the reports from
his own state secretaries: he prefers to chat about
them) and who, since the first week of his
presidency, abdicated from the presidency of the
National Security Council, leaving it to the
ambitious Condoleezza Rice. The president announced
that he would attend sporadically and “Condi” would
report the results to him afterwards.
O’Neill, a successful impresario used to working in
multinational companies, where all information is
analyzed and discussed as a mandatory precursor in
the decision-making process, found it difficult to
accept that attitude. He affirms that Bush conducts
cabinet meetings as if he were absent or dislocated,
avoiding any intellectual exchange and making
decisions using set phrases that he repeats over and
over, although they may not bear any relation to the
subject (“we have to reaffirm our principles; to
behave accordingly”).
Stunned by the effects of what Spaniards would call
the “negotiations of idiots,” after the first
meetings he concluded that the president was a blind
man in a room full of deaf people. Shortly
afterwards, the meetings got worse. The former
secretary would arrive at the weekly meeting with
copies of reports previously sent to the president
to discover that he was unfamiliar with the issues
and limited himself to staring hard at him, with an
attitude that O’Neill initially attributed to a
shrewd strategy to assess his professional capacity,
and later as a desire to avoid any expression or
corporal indication that could send out the wrong
messages to financial markets.
Nothing like it! says O’Neill, who offers one
interesting detail on the invasion of Iraq: during
the Security Council’s second meeting – 10 days
after assuming the presidency and seven months
before September 11 – to the surprise of those
present, the agenda included a CIA report on Iraq
(Policy of Conduct) and a “political-military plan
for the control of Iraq after Saddam.” The obvious
result was that one month after taking power, Donald
Rumsfeld and Cheney (whom Rumsfeld calls “Kid
Gloves” on account of the fact that he never leaves
any trace of his actions) had already decided to
invade Iraq and were not asking “why” but “when” and
“how quickly?”
After the first year, O’Neill realized that he had
been invited to participate as an extra in an
administration in which the president was unfamiliar
with issues on the national agenda and the
consequences of his international policy, whilst
official decisions and policies were adopted and
formulated by a group of officials acting on his
behalf. For O’Neill, all issues are controlled
directly or indirectly by a group led by Cheney, and
including Rumsfeld, Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and
neo-conservative ideologists like Karl Rove and
Richard Perle. They are the ones who are determining
administration policies and, in the end, governing
the country. It should be remembered that all the
members of this group, including Andrew Card, White
House chief of staff, are close friends or former
members of Bush Sr’s cabinet. For this reason,
circumstances force us to ask whether Cheney and his
group have hijacked Bush’s will since the start of
the administration (as some media channels suspected
prior to September 11), or whether he and his team
are working surreptitiously for Bush Sr. in what
would be his second term of office.
Faced with a breakdown in relations with U.S.
society, it would not be untoward if either of these
options led to a coup aimed at strengthening the
fundamentalist right wing. At the launch of his
alarming book Plan of Attack, a criticism of
the Bush administration, journalist Bob Woodward
revealed last Sunday that when he asked the
president if he was concerned at the historic
perception of his government on the Iraqi issue,
Bush held out his hands, shrugged his shoulders and
answered by saying “History...? We’ll all be dead by
then...”
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