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[JB note: Am posting this "old" piece -- in response to George W.H. Bush stating that "Cheney [is/has?] an 'iron-ass' and ... Rumsfeld 'an arrogant fellow'"; [Note the Dubya reference to 'ass' (a Bush family obsession?) below.]Too Parochial for EmpireExcerpt:
The Bush Administration Conquers Washington
By John Brown
As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my "Bush's Last Day Countdown Keychain" tells me there are 433 days, 11 hrs, 50 minutes and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about the fate of the Republic, I wonder what the Bush legacy will be. ...[T]he Bush administration was never able to define, shape, or direct in an "imperial" fashion the powerful forces, negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American democracy.) As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their "offices") -- the only "empire" that really counted for them was the parochial world of Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf-wars about who among them would get government money for their minions and projects, overseas or at home. This was the narcissistic province that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense had the urge to dominate with their "unitary executive," "wartime," commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the U.S., however, mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.The President and His DiplomatsTo make some sense of all this, let's start at the top. With his utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of Mexico), George W. Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself, imperial or otherwise. In thewords of commentator William Pfaff, "Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing." The President's major foreign-policy decision -- to invade Iraq -- was certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire to portray himself as a decisive commander in chief to the American electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat boy just wanted to"kick ass" overseas to show the media, voters, and possibly even himself, that he was doing something other than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.Kicking ass -- playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards -- has remarkably little to do, however, with anything that might once have been defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement such plans. For example, a year after his "axis of evil" State of the Union Address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and Shiites in their country, "emperor" Bush allegedly responded that he thought "the Iraqis were Muslims." (No way, after all, that you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarizes George W. Bush's preparation for putative empire building than the following nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:"When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word 'Taliban' -- the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and repressive version of Islamic law -- during a verbal Rorschach test, Mr. Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the writer gave him a hint ('repression of women in Afghanistan') that Mr. Bush replied, 'Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive.'" ...According to some commentators, when it came to the American ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the distant Ford administration. Some argue that they -- and their neocon poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well assorted neocons once linked to the Likud party in Israel and the Christian right in the U.S. -- were the true framers of a Bush empire.To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New American Century and no doubt had ideas -- or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading as ideas -- about a more aggressive use of American military strength throughout the world. Cheney's former position as CEO of Halliburton and his connections with large corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural resources for the American imperium.Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand U.S. influence and resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld's utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what happened there ("events" which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq -- or success in that country -- was indeed important but mainly to the extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the empire itself that really mattered. There, "war" would mean ... a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress, courts, anything -- which meant power in the only world that mattered to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding, unfinished accounts -- both personal and political -- to settle. "Foreign policy," in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the Vice President and Secretary of Defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only place that mattered, Washington, DC.If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise in their previous Washington stays -- the State Department and the CIA -- perhaps because those organizations, at their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States, and not just how the United States could dismiss the world. Just as Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq to "kick ass" among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the Intelligence Community. (Consider Cheney's treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the administration's claim about Saddam Hussein's search for uranium yellowcake in Niger in the late 1990s.) In toppling Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their foreign policy "experts" and their acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to actual U.S. national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was, just recall the Secretary of Defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging neocon Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the heap and visibly loving every second of it. Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never the reality of Iraq -- any more than it did when George W. Bush strutted that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his "mission accomplished" moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of the imperial joke, as was -- for a while -- the rest of the outside world.Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy moment perfectly. The U.S., he wrote, made "foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and Lichtenstein."In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to perceive a world beyond the Washington of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, beyond George W. Bush's national security "homeland." That may be the President's ultimate legacy.
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