The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality
Published: March 13, 2010
THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week,
aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press
secretary,
declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He
apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)
Barry Blitt
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe,
a new right-wing noise machine
invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William
Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them
tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it
retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White
House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban,
Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering
America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of
this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s
book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the
White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor
vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to
leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are
relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the
brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security
malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike
back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again
come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone
will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled
America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
There’s
a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,”
not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is
repackaged with an alibi.
The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events.
For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he
writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the
assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off
by only three.)
After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late
adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred
with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity.
This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was
published
that his marriage ended in divorce.
Rove’s
overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war
is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred
without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have
looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the
intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security.
Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the
White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the
intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is
absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff,
said on MSNBC,
it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American
fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on
which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal
failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”
Rove and his
book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s
crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its
viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials
who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay
detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda
Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo
of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this
smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of
the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started
spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
This
McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among
those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning
of honorable Americans’ patriotism are
Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and
former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society.
When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a
right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a
fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.
This is
hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves
from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards
the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for
its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the
Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey,
doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform.
Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference
after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand,
who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is
leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and
has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.
In
this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still
must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions,
whether about “death panels” or “
uranium from Africa,”
can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s
unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her
chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars,
reported last week by Joe Hagan
in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called
mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more
thoroughly
in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
(editor's note)
Construction
9-11 Research pages on the history, architecture, and construction
of the Twin Towers:
Destruction
On the day of 9/11, 2001, the three skyscrapers
of the World Trade Center complex were totally destroyed,
Structural collapse due to
a combination of structural damage and fire
is the reason given by official reports for the leveling of
110-story WTC 1 (the North Tower),
110-story WTC 2 (the South Tower),
and 47-story WTC 7,
with strong emphasis on the role of fires.
That would make these the only three cases in history
tall steel-framed structures collapsing
mostly or entirely due to fires.
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What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an
Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome;
the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier
Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in
the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin
their own failings on their successors.
Obama may well make — or
is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility
for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative
that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most
devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s
term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A.
director, George Tenet,
called the “blinking red” alarms
before 9/11.
It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who
lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees
vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of
Rove’s propaganda campaign, who
promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence
about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed
those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond —
and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.
The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As
The Times reported last weekend,
Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with
Tehran through foreign subsidiaries until 2007, even as the Bush
administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts,
including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was
also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi,
the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of
the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it,
and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.
Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq,
warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election,
meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to
facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times
reported on Chalabi’s ties
to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week,
fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire
process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he
appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.
If
we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly
which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from
2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget
it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological
zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this
day.
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Oral Histories
An extensive body of evidence consisting of statements by
503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians
who witnessed the events in New York City on 9/11/2001
was collected between October of 2001 and January of 2002
on the order of Thomas Von Essen,
the city fire commissioner
until he was succeeded by Nicholas Scoppetta in January of 2002.
The New York Times sought the release of this evidence,
filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the city,
which was refusing to release the transcripts.
On August 12, 2005, the Times
announced that it would publish the transcripts of the "oral histories"
and promptly did so.
