Dick Cheney's Fingerprints
Dick Cheney's Fingerprints,
THE BOOK,
Published December 15, 2006
Author’s note:
There’s been unending complaint on the part of the Bush administration, that the pitfalls of war in Iraq could not have been known.
Wrong.
Many of us knew. And we wrote about it--not after the disaster became apparent, but months before the invasion. We acknowledged what would go right and, much more importantly, spelled out what would go wrong and how and when and who the players would be.
THE BOOK,
Published December 15, 2006
Author’s note:
There’s been unending complaint on the part of the Bush administration, that the pitfalls of war in Iraq could not have been known.
Wrong.
Many of us knew. And we wrote about it--not after the disaster became apparent, but months before the invasion. We acknowledged what would go right and, much more importantly, spelled out what would go wrong and how and when and who the players would be.
Ordinary citizens, most of us, who perhaps keep more closely in touch with what goes on in the world outside America, but ordinary in any event.
We were not privy to insider information, but not hampered either by predilections left over from earlier, failed administrations. George Bush was said to be haunted by his father’s failure to go all the way in the first Iraq War—Desert Storm. Joined (some say overpowered) by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in planning a response to the 9-11 attacks on America, the very highest positions of our government were given-over to paranoia and special-interest.
Paranoia, in the furtive governance of George Walker Bush, who lacked the popular vote of his country and was seated in the Oval Office only as the result of a controversial and historically unprecedented decision of the Supreme Court. Bush wanted desperately, perhaps too desperately, to be a decisive, commanding, swaggering president.
Paranoia. in Bush’s excuse to take a national disaster and, in its name, block all reasoned dissent behind the cloak of national security.
Special-interest on the part of of Vice-President Dick Cheney to re-empower the presidency, a task he considered sacred after witnessing the presidential wreckage of Dick Nixon’s resignation.
Cheney is on record as believing Vietnam could have been ‘won,’ if only the United States had not left.
He has publicly stated his dedication to the unilateral power of the office of the President, unfettered by constraint, either in Congress or the courts.
Special-interest on the part of Don Rumsfeld, to reorganize the American military in his vision of a small, high-tech, mobile, fighting force. Occupying troops, the famous boots on the ground, were anathema to Rumsfeld in his drive to downsize and modernize the Pentagon.
Returning to the office of Secretary of Defense after a 30-year hiatus, it was his stated policy that America would dominate space, that none others challenging American space technology would be permitted in this new frontier.
I believe that these strong-minded men, along with their highly-effective and politically ruthless assistants, came to dominate a weak president--a man who was essentially disinterested, as well as tactically and philosophically in over his head.
Rushing to judgment, unwilling to listen to opposed points of view, temporarily empowered by control of both houses of Congress and seizing upon what had been delivered to them by a terrorist plot, a small cadre of powerful men, clustered around the president, essentially hijacked representative government.
The Iraq War is but one element of that hijacking, but perhaps its most public face. This was, and continues to be, a war with Dick Cheney’s fingerprints all over it.
--Jim Freeman
Dick Cheney's Fingerprints brings together more than 60 of Freeman's essays relevant to the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's response--or non-response--to the ongoing disaster of a forced policy, undertaken in the wrong country for the wrong reasons.
Beginning 533 days before the invasion of Iraq and ending 1,367 long, slogging days afterward, Dick Cheney's Fingerprints answers the administration's who knew? and stuff happens with the day-by-day fact that we knew and Washington would not listen.
Buy it now, buy a dozen copies to give to your friends, or e-mail this page to anyone who disbelieves in this war.