How can you not love a guy who says, “I’m an old guy and I’m rich, and there’s nothing they can do to harm me?”
On the other hand, how can you not kind of wonder when that same chap follows up with, “How can I get into trouble when I’m only speaking the truth?”
Is Paul O’Neill, the delectable anti-Bush Cinderella of the moment, a brilliant eccentric, a sincere American and/or a naive observer of the political scene? Or perhaps all of those–and more?
I have just finished reading every doggone word of the book, wordily titled “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill,” outlining O’Neill’s curious and bumpy two years as Treasury secretary. And I have a slightly different read on it from the many analysts who, given the self-defeating secrecy of this administration, naturally fix upon insider revelations or criticism.
Some of the book’s administration time-line details will stand as acutely important historically. Through the book’s actual author, distinguished journalist Ronald Suskind, the disgruntled former Treasury secretary tells how on Jan. 30, 2000–a mere 10 days after W.’s inauguration–one of the first White House meetings was dominated by 1) getting the U.S. out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it was hopeless, and 2) regime change in Iraq, including through military means. “Ten days in, and it was about Iraq,” O’Neill says.
Then on Feb. 1, 2001, what would become the administration’s obsession over overthrowing Saddam Hussein continued as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as saying, “But what we really want to think about is going after Saddam.”
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O’Neill says he saw Hussein being used as a “demonstration model of America’s new, unilateral resolve.” Moreover, “If it could effectively be shown that he possessed, or was trying to build, weapons of mass destruction–creating an `asymmetric threat,’ in the neo-conservative parlance, to U.S. power in the region–his overthrow would help `dissuade’ other countries from doing the same …
“From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it.”
So when Sept. 11, 2001, happened many months later, that tragic event actually had little to do with the move to attack Iraq because, says O’Neill, that decision had essentially already been made. And after Sept. 11, he further relates, neo-cons argued for going into Iraq because it would be an “easier” target than Afghanistan, as well as, again, an easier “demonstration model” against other restive weapons of mass destruction trigger-happy nations.
In these same meetings, O’Neill has CIA Director George Tenet laying out a “span of covert activity around the globe, including plots and assassinations …” At its core was the enabling provision that there be virtually “no civilian oversight.” America’s strange new path was being laid.
But O’Neill is more interesting when he goes into rhetorical gyrations about the nature of the administration itself.
He saw an administration–and a rigid, cold and pugnacious mentality–so different from earlier American administrations he had known, and so unrooted in the traditional American past, that it veritably chilled him.
The president himself? He was “not about analysis … but about tactics.” In the meetings with George W., there was “virtually no engagement … no discernible connection.”
O’Neill pressed everywhere for the kind of imperfect but “authentic discussions” of issues, based upon experience and the lessons derived from it, that he had enjoyed under American presidents from Nixon to Ford to Bush 41. But everywhere he found himself up against the cold closed door of the sheerly political, the tiresomely tactical or the Jacobin power fanaticism of the neo-cons.
“I think an ideology comes out of feelings, and it tends to be non-thinking,” he writes. “A philosophy, on the other hand, can have a structured thought base … There is a constant interplay between what do I think and why do I think it … Ideology is a lot easier, because you don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.”
Finally, some other thoughts related to O’Neill’s disclosures:
– The respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just released a study charging that Bush administration officials “systematically misrepresented” the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq presented no immediate threat to America and that, during 2002, intelligence became “excessively politicized” in order to push the country toward war.
– Another report, by veteran defense analyst and professor Jeffrey Record and published by the prestigious Army War College, accuses the Bush administration of taking the United States into an “unnecessary” war in Iraq, pursuing an “unrealistic” quest against terrorism that may lead America into “strategically unfocused” conflicts and bring the American Army to “near the breaking point.”
– But the last word may have come from another former Cabinet member, Robert Reich, who wrote a critical book about his own term as Labor secretary in the Clinton administration. Commenting on the Bush administration’s criticism of O’Neill for his “disloyalty,” Reich said, “Cabinet members should be loyal to a president, but they have a larger loyalty–to the public.”
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Gigi(underscore)[email protected]