[Mb-civic] MUST READ-what Bill sent

[Mary Louise smn]

       Michael           "WOW!!"       Thanks..............are you able to 
forward to other web sites......powerful............................ML


>From: Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com>
>Reply-To: mb-civic at islandlists.com
>To: Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>, HAIR List <mb-hair at islandlists.com>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] MUST READ-what Bill sent
>Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 15:43:26 -0800
>
>Message: 5
>Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:18:32 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Deconstructing Cheney - James Carroll - Boston
>     Globe    Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <436F4618.4020105 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>Deconstructing Cheney
>
>By James Carroll  |  November 7, 2005
>
>THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and
>obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the
>long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He
>began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald
>Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs
>to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's
>''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that
>Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity,
>the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two
>set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of
>the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.
>
>When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again
>tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the
>fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.
>Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War
>bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to
>refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key
>to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age.
>Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from
>the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central
>America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's
>response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war
>against Panama.
>
>As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the
>Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification
>for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he
>leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
>Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.
>
>Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs
>Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over
>diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was
>in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of
>international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US
>responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark
>contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to
>save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks.
>The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit
>in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil
>industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any
>other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.
>
>With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable
>that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road
>appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit
>in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The
>true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the
>national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as
>vice president) showed itself for a moment.
>
>The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room,
>Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air
>Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut
>Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's
>absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the
>president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There
>was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make
>an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.
>
>At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an
>instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war
>on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to,
>and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side),
>Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running,
>he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney
>ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney
>fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the
>war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for
>which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the
>chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.
>
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/07/
>deconstructing_cheney/
>
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