Month: April 2004

France deports muslim cleric who publicly condoned the beating, stoning of women. Multiculturalism has its limits.

Bush Middle East policy has apparently succeeded in alienating every state in the area except Israel. Pissing King Abdullah off into a diplomatic protest hasn’t been an easy task, but it’s one that Bush has successfully taken on.

A guide to appearing on MTV’s Cribs. Get your preparation on so you ‘n’ your dawgs can show where you do your chillin’ at!

Those in the Bush Administration who whine about betrayals and disloyalty should take a look at themselves. Let’s see, O’Neill, Clarke, now Powell… see a pattern anywhere?

Here are a few things you might like to know before using Gmail. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not actually out to get you!

How ‘in the loop’ is Colin Powell in the White House? Apparently he ranks just below the Saudi Ambassador to the US, which in the House of Bush is actually pretty high.

It’s time for CleverShark.com to get into the book-reviewing business! Today, I review two books I have read recently which shed some insight and throw some opinions out about the current White House. Note that the links go to Amazon’s order page on the subject, should you be interested in reading the book for yourself.

• Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke (Free Press)
  
• The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind (Simon & Schuster)
  

I have also read Peter Singer’s President of Good and Evil… kinda. I left off two thirds of the way through; coming from someone who reads as voraciously as I do, that should tell you something about the quality of writing and thinking in this book. Let’s just say that he lost me about halfway through when he started to say that there was no case for invading Afghanistan after 9/11, but then my flight hadn’t touched down yet, so I trudged on a bit… that sort of opinion is too outlandish even for the loony fringe. So, no link. It did, however, teach me to never again purchase a book by a self-described “philosopher”.

Let’s get back to the books that will be discussed. They are surprisingly different books; I would have expected that they but this is far from the case. In the case of the O’Neill book the scope of the narrative is tightly limited by the term served by the former Treasury Secretary; the Clarke book goes into considerably more historical exposition, partly of course because Clarke was on the National Security Council staff for a period spanning four administrations, and its core subject — the current wave of “jihadist” terrorism — requires a lot more intro.

Against All Enemies

Against all Enemies opens with a breathtaking, first-person chapter about Clarke’s own role in managing the crisis on 9/11/01. This is the sort of first chapters that just gets you hooked on the book the moment you open it, especially (as in my case) if you were in the New York area that day. The chapter practically gets you breaking a sweat. It’s one of those things that has to be experienced.

The book then goes on to some exposition of the roots of “jihadist” terrorism, from the US’s endorsement of the Afghan Mujahideens’ cause in the eighties to Bin Laden’s Afghan Services Bureau to the present day. From someone who remembers the Cold War, and the role of the muj in the Afghan conflict, this was fascinating reading that left me sometimes shaking my head as I pondered what the jihadist movement was then, and what it has become now.

This does imply an important lesson as to the future consequences of current action, although not explicitly; inter alia the historical part serves as a warning that something which seems absolutely right at this time can lead to dire and awful consequences in the future. Unfortunately, given the stated philosophy of the Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney axis currently in power in Washington, this is a lesson which seems likely to be completely lost on the current administration, which frankly worries me deeply about the future.

Clarke spends a lot of time on Bill Clinton’s actions against terrorism, which is only natural, as he served eight years under Clinton, who was the first President to have to deal with the issue. Clarke dispels a number of Republican myths about that era, including the old chestnut that Sudan somehow offered to “hand over” Bin Laden to the US (never happened except perhaps in a Newt Gingrich wet dream).

Of course the part of the book which is getting the most attention nowadays is the section on George W. Bush’s handling of the terrorist threat before 9/11. Clarke’s message is essentially that Bush didn’t handle it with any sort of urgency… which really shouldn’t be news by this point. Bush literally admitted as much to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, and is directly quoted as such!

Condi Rice may have done the rounds of the press circuit denouncing the book, but frankly she has failed to convince the thinking reader. In fact, given the almost total unpreparedness of the Administration to face 9/11, the rush to embark on the folly which is Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the utter and total blame-shifting and string of excuses which has been the White House’s response to 9/11 — most blatantly and shamelessly on the part of the Attorney-General — the administration has a huge credibility gap to address to a large segment of the population. Poll numbers relating to this book do not necessarily show it, but then things like truth aren’t things decided by opinion polls.

As such, when I hear attacks on the credibility of this book, I always say “consider the source”, and inevitably that source turns out to be someone in the administration who would directly profit enormously from its being ignored, much more so in fact than Clarke can hope to get from sales of the book! Another criticism is that Clarke is doing this for “political gain”, but again the critique inevitably can be traced to the Vice-President’s office — whose continuing political gain is directly dependent on people not reading the sort of revelations Clarke has to make. I’m afraid that by and large that level of logical analysis does not seem to have a big following around here, which I find unsettling.

All in all I found Against All Enemies to be a riveting read and well worth the time and expense, if you’re at all interested in the subject. If you’re interested in the book follow the link at the top of the article!

The Price of Loyalty

By the standards of my current literary interests this book is quite old! It dates back all the way to January. This was really the first of a series of books critical of George W. Bush written by someone who should know, and boy was O’Neill ever attacked by Republican sources over this!

Unlike Clarke’s, this book was not written by O’Neill himself, but it was written in very close collaboration, so close in fact that the whole of the book’s contents can safely be attributed directly to O’Neill. Suskind is a reporter, and he is being true to his trade here.

They barked about treason and betrayal, which is really ironic to anyone who’s read the now-famous volume, because it shows plainly how Bush’s neoconservative cabal (to wit, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Larry Lindsey et al) essentially hired O’Neill to lend some economic gravitas to an administration that was definitely top-light in that area, only shut the former Alcoa CEO completely out of the economic “debate” going on at the White House. The rest, as the saying goes, is history — from huge projected surpluses the country is now mired in deficits (which Dick Cheney, the man in charge, appears to believe “don’t matter”).

There are really three dimensions to the narrative. The first is economic — O’Neill was, after all, CEO of a major company before being picked for the Treasury. As such he’s quite comfortable writing about the various tools and data sets used to measure the country’s economic situation. Suskind himself used to write for the Wall Street Journal.

The second is the personal strata, which comes out most prominently as the Africa trek is mentioned. As was in the news at the time O’Neill toured a few countries in Africa with U2’s Bono as part of a sort of economic fact-finding trip. It’s striking to realize how seeing the real African situation — stepping away from the Bush-style “photo ops in a box” type travel — deeply affected O’Neill, who was not a man without experience of poverty himself. In the end one gets a sense that this profound appreciation of the real world outside of the beltway and boardroom was really the ultimate wedge which drove him from an ideologue Administration into which he had never quite fit anyway.

This brings us to the political aspects of the book, which are naturally the most important. We are ushered into a White House which, despite being insistent on his joining the team, never seriously considered the maverick CEO as “one of them”, despite his long-standing personal relationships with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell. We are shown how, from the start, O’Neill was effectively shut out of a heavily-protected, secretive political decision-making process, and as such was increasingly ridiculed and attacked from inside sources. That is not to say that O’Neill did not have his gaffes though; his early comments on the dollar were widely misinterpreted, and O’Neill should probably have seen that coming, but even before he joined the Treasury team the Alcoa CEO was known as a loose-lipped shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy; in fact I would go so far as to say, and this is definitely implied in the book, that misunderstandings occurred chiefly because considerably more time was spent by O’Neill thinking about what he was going to say than by reporters analyzing exactly what he had said. I would even venture that in all likelihood the nuances which he put into his pronouncements, even informally, were beyond the reporters’ ability to fully grasp.

In the end O’Neill is not even surprised to get the call announcing that he was dismissed, and the narrative is woven in such a way that the reader isn’t either. Clearly he wasn’t willing to just be a quiet, impotent figurehead for the Treasury while the the secretive, ideology-driven neoconservatives mucked things up, and this put O’Neill in a situation where he was not only hounded by the press, but openly attacked from the likes of Larry Lindsey (who was dismissed along with him) and publicly ridiculed by the President himself in his “good ol’ frat boy” kind of way. Reading the book you start wondering why he stuck around so long putting up with that kind of, well, crap from people whose demeanour is supposed to be dignified and cooperative.

In the end one just has to love his self-confessed reason for going ahead with the book — “I’m an old guy, and I’m rich. And there’s nothing they can do to hurt me.” This compelling book about life in the White House by a man outside of the neocon “inner sanctum” is well worth your time.

Common Elements

Both books do have an important common element — the President, and how business is conducted in the White House under the W presidency. I’m not going to comment here about the President’s intellectual abilities, because I simply don’t think that’s a factor. Whether or not the abilities are there we seem to be in a situation where the President is simply choosing not to exercise them, and that’s an undertone not only common to both these books but also to an excellent other volume I read over the weekend called Rogue State.

Simply put, this President is a CEO type who is entirely dependent on his staff to filter the information that gets through to him. One might argue that all Presidents do the same, but that just doesn’t square with reality. Clarke repeatedly talks of Clinton as someone who’d read a myriad of books and insist on seeing detailed information, sometimes staying up until ungodly hours to get through an interesting bit of reading. This stands in sharp constrast with the forty-third President who, as is widely known, is in bed by 10pm.

This, normally, might not be much to worry about. After all, the President has a staff whose job it is to handle the incoming information and “digest” it for him. However, in this administration it’s clear that the staff itself is a problem. All accounts I’ve read so far indicate that it is Dick Cheney who is running the White House staff through Andy Card. Cheney was largely responsible for picking the Bush Cabinet, and he went to great lengths to choose people who, if nothing else, were known to embrace the same very radical — some would go so far as to say extreme — views which he subscribes to. Those views collectively have become known as “neoconservatism”, and far from representing any type of genuine conservatism they instead represent an extreme form of American nationalism expanded to a global basis.

What I find shocking about this is that it’s not a subtle process. Unless he is a complete idiot, which I don’t believe for a minute, the President clearly knows that he is getting only one side of the issue, and he is tacitly in full approval of this situation. The O’Neill book goes on at some lengths to describe how even the “discussion meetings” held at the White House are completely scripted affairs conducted under the watchful eye of Dick Cheney, who joins in via monitor from his “undisclosed location”, big-brother-like, even to the point that when in one instance the meeting becomes free-form the participants hardly know what to even make of it.

In short we have a President in the White House who neither knows nor cares (nor cares to know) of non-neoconservative ways to approach issues, and yet he is at the top of a government which must handle all sorts of situations not covered by the neocon manifesto. Situations like… 9/11. In retrospect this explains a lot; ideology is simply unable to handle situations which are not planned for. Reality has a way of biting people on the ass like that. And it has. What’s more it’s likely to happen again, and the evidence that the US government will be any more prepared to handle it then it was the last time is, frankly, thin. Duct tape won’t solve all our woes.

Conclusion

None of these two books goes on to venture into the lost art of fortune-telling. However, it is a recognized truism that one must study the past in order to be prepared for the future. In these two books by people who worked (albeit with some degree of metaphysical distance) with the current President of the United States we are presented with a picture of an intellectually distant President who is neither a)getting all the information which he needs in order to make non-doctrinaire decisions, or b)willing to reconsider decisions (“negociate with himself”) when he does get the information he needs. All in all this is a fairly frightening image of an administration almost entirely run by shadowy, largely unelected neoconservaitve “intellectuals” obsessed with letting ideology reign supreme over reality. This is a rather worrisome episode in American history, and one on which the books will not close for some time.

Telemarketing got you down? why? use the system to your advantage! It’s the world’s cheapest chat-line!

Two interestingly divergent views of Paris. AAAAAAAAARGH! The goggles, they do nothing!

New York City traffic cop tickets man having a heart attack, then turns around and leaves. Where do people get the idea that New York is an uncaring city?