The Doctrine of Waaahhhhh: Cheney's Distortions and Lies

If Dick Cheney's recent interview with John King on CNN served any purpose,  it was to demonstrate the the arguments of the Bush Administration still have no wisdom and consciousness.

The former Vice President made two main points: the Obama Administration is using the economic crisis as a pretext to strengthen the Federal authority over private sector, and the US is getting less safe day by day. As for any responsibility that his own Administration might face for economic failure, well, the Bushmen had faced a global financial crisis and disasters like Katrina. So while the Bush Administration had done its best and can not be labeled as “unsuccessful”, Obama is clearly ruining the economic and the political systems of the US.

Shall we run an eye over these arguments and, with a tap of the analytic finger, knock them down?

CHENEYISM No. 1 – "Increasing Authority of the Government over the Private Sector"

But the key, I think, is the extent to which they fix the problem with the financial institutions in the society. That is a federal government responsibility. It is the banks, it is the Federal Reserve, it is the FDIC, it is all of the financial regulations and management of our currency that is a federal responsibility... I worry a lot that they are using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government and much more authority for the government over the private sector, and I don't think that it is good.

I think the programs that he has recommended and pursuing in health care, in energy, and so forth, constitute probably the biggest expansions of federal authority over the private economy in the history of the republic.”
My own belief is that the way we grow the economy, create jobs, create wealth is in the private sector. The government does not do that.”

Mistake No: 1 - Shooting himself with his own gun:

Cheney: “I don't think you can blame the Bush Administration for the creation of those circumstances. It is a global financial crisis....People with their savings being diminished because of the state of the economy, [are] reluctant to spend; trying to hang on to everything they can, and, naturally, it results in a slower level of economic growth.”
A moment's reflection might reveal that people be in attempt of holding on to everything they can, not because the government is lecturing citizens not to spend, but because they are reacting against a partially-free-market economy. They are doing so because investment nor putting money in banks is perceived as ‘plausible’, given that both the credit costs for banks and the cost of investing in the private sector --- during a downturn in demand for "private" goods --- are very high.

If the liberal system is economically damaged and if this crisis becomes a global one, then someone should remind Mr. Cheney that the capitalist world economy always rests upon the sovereignty of states (state intervention) and the inter-state system and global measures. Governments in the capitalist mode of production remove blockages and deadlocks within the system; when the private sector has nothing to open up the system during a crisis, that private sector needs government interventions. Instead of hiding behind senseless clichés, Mr. Cheney should have stated his hope for and belief in the Obama Administration as a supporter of the capitalist system and the private sector.

Mistake No. 2: The assumption that the private sector alone can lead the economy, even during the crisis

Cheney: “We are seeing an argument made that we have got economic difficulties, therefore, we are going to have a cap and trade program with respect to carbon emissions. That is a huge energy tax that is going to be applied across the society.”

Not necessarily. If the capitalist system is in a crisis and there is a decrease in the hegemonic (American) power --- simply put, if the gap between the US and other core areas such as South Asia in the accumulation of capital has been getting smaller --- then the US must focus on a sustainable high-technology production to renew the global system's infrastructure. The revolution in the 1490s was mercantilism; it was factories and industrial infrastructures in the 1890s; and it has been communications since the demise of the Soviets. This time, the revolution cannot just be wished up from the private sector: with the US in a financial crisis thanks to the huge tax cuts and the trillion-dollar-plus "War on Terror" of the Bush Administration, government intervention is inevitable at this stage.

A useful perspective on this comes in Susan George's article "Of Capitalism, Crisis, Conversion and Collapse: The Keynesian Alternative" on the unsustainable ecological crisis. George asserts that eco-friendly industries and products would have huge export value and could quickly become the world standard through the environmental Keynesianism.

Someone should remind Mr. Cheney that while the US built up a budget deficit of more than $2 trillion between 2002 and 2008 when the US has spent more than $1 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq, and when the accumulation of capital has expanded geographically with the emergence of more "semi-peripheries" in the midst of a global economic crisis, it is only the US Government that can save dollar's future.

CHENEYISM No. 2: "The US is Getting Less Safe"

Cheney: “President Obama is making some choices, in my mind; in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack....I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we have accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.”

Do I need to re-state that one in seven Iraqis are homeless, that hundreds of thousands have been killed, that the escalation of Sunni v. Shia and Arab v. Kurdish escalations has laid dynamite, for future generations, that the supposed fight in Iraq against terror has brought a rise in terror from the Kurdish-backed PKK in northern Iraq and from Iran-backed Shia militias, that democracy has brought undemocratic regulations by Shia-dominated government? (For further information please read Juan Cole's striking arguments.)

Cheney: “The fact is, the violence level is down 90 percent. The number of casualties and Iraqis and Americans is significantly diminished.”

This does not demonstrate success. What does it mean even if violence had decreased 99 percent? Who is responsible for the violence in Iraq since 2003? Mr. Cheney's statement is nothing but an escape through simple and indigested data.

Cheney: “The defeat of Al Qa'eda...”

Since there were no Al Qa'eda bases or headquarters in Iraq in 2003 if Bush and Cheney had been intent on destroying bin Laden and his men, then they would not have deployed 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan and 176,000 US troops in Iraq.

Cheney: “A major defeat for the Iranians living next door to Iraq...”

Did I miss something? Did Iran suspend or give up its nuclear enrichment program? The argument of "defeat" of Iran's "terorrists" in Iraq seems to be little more than an excuse for the price tag of more than $1 trillion for US operations.

Cheney: “I think if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorists-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction... What happened in Iraq is we have eliminated that possibility.”

If we are talking about possibilities, can we claim that because there might be a nuclear war among states in the future because the US has the most of the nuclear warheads in the world? Indeed, wouldn't it better to call on the international community for an anti-US offensive campaign so that those bombs would not be killing us or future generations? That is the level of the nonsense in Mr. Cheney's statement.

CHENEYISM No. 3: The Reasons We Are Less Safe Now

Cheney: “I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11.”

"Those programs" include CIA "black sites" around the world, the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, state-sanction "enhanced interrogations" by the military and CIA, waterboarding, the muddled procedure of miilitary commissoins to try those under the deceptive label of "enemy combatants". Apparently, the best way to keep the US safe comes down to torturing humans.

CHENEYISM No. 4: It's All OK Because of 9/11

Cheney: “We made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said this is a war. It is not a law enforcement problem. Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail.... Once you go into a war time situation and it is a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they have got sanctuary. You use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you... When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they are doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that is required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you are going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.”

The discourse of the "War on Terror" strengthens the "US" v. "Them" rationale, projecting the enemy threat, blurring any empathy or even recognition of the "Other", and supporting policymakers' quest for power through "security".

The former Vice President's statements are far away from an honest reflection, both of what had happened during the Bush Administration and what has been happening since the takeover of President Obama. Indeed, Mr. Cheney's lies and allegations reveal that we have been lucky to survive the Bush Administration. However, what about the ones who lost their lives under tons of US bombs while sleeping in their beds?

Thank you, former Vice President, for that reminder. Thank you very much.

The Bush-Cheney Legacy and Iraq

On Sunday former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his mission both to denigrate the Obama Administration as unworthy and unsafe and to re-write history with an extended interview on CNN. After answering a damning indictment of the Bush economic record with the cure-all, "Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11," Cheney turned to Iraq: "We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."

Juan Cole sets out those accomplishments:

*An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity.

$32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.

Flashback: Jon Stewart, Politics, and Crossfire in 2004

Related Post: Jon Stewart: Can “Mainstream” Media Put Him Back in His Box?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE[/youtube]

One of the delicious ironies of the post-mortem of The Daily Show-CNBC clash, which we've covered elsewhere this morning, was the appearance of puffed-up talking head Tucker Carlson. Carlson, who rose to small-screen prominence in the 1990s pundit explosion with a distinctive appearance (his bowtie) rather than any expertise or insight, had Jon Stewart all figured out as a "partisan demagogue":

[Jim Cramer's] real sin was attacking Obama's economic policies. If he hadn't done that, Stewart never would have gone after him. Stewart's doing Obama's bidding. It's that simple.

To be fair to Carlson, who in no way is a partisan demagogue, he may still be smarting from a 2004 incident during his short-lived tenure as co-host of Crossfire on CNN. In a few minutes, Stewart --- no doubt as a comic rather than as a "serious" observer --- took apart the artifice of "political" commentary. Crossfire, which had been a useful forum for debate with Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan in the previous decade but which had become a shouting pit with the likes of Carlson, was soon cancelled.

Breaking: New 'Bin Laden' Tape Broadcast

Al-Jazeera has broadcast a new tape purportedly recorded by Osama bin Laden. In it the speaker calls Israel's recent incursion into Gaza a "holocaust" and attacks as "hypocrites" Arab leaders who were allegedly complicity in Israel's offensive:

"It has become clear that some Arab leaders were complicit with the crusade of the Zionist alliance against our people. These are the leaders that America calls moderate"

According to al-Jazeera 'Bin Laden' also "called for support for the mujahidin in Iraq and said that his network of fighters would "go to Jordan from the sea to the river to liberate Palestine".

Mr Obama's War: Taliban at the Gates

CNN has a dramatic headline this morning: "Taliban Poised at the Gates of Kabul". The story is based on interviews with two very different sources, a Taliban leader and a Kabul police commander.

It's an atmosphere piece rather than a consideration of latest developments, but the conclusion is still significant in its focus on the local rather than on plans for the US military:

Coalition forces have no choice by to keep rooting for Kabul's cops. By the end of the year, NATO will hand over much of the responsibility for securing the capital to the city's police force. And that will be a crucial test to see if this city and this country can stand on its own, even with the Taliban standing at the gate.