TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- Political Discussion / Debate
-- O'Neill: Bush planned war in Iraq before 9/11
Pages (2): « 1 [2]
hehe. Axises. 
I tell ya Vesa, it is truly an education to read your posts. I must admit that I can't completely adhere to your entire view, but I am in no position to disagree and debate specifics, that's for damn sure!
Anyways, just wanted to point out something I ran across lately that agrees pretty well with your view here:
| quote: |
| Neocons usually write responses to mistaken accusations made by anti-Neocons, claiming that the particular politician was 1) a paranoid conspiracy theorist, 2) a leftist, 3) an anti-semitist, 4) a softy, 5) just ignorant. Therefore, there have been few if any analytical discussions about Neocon foreign policy because anti-Neocons simply don't have enough insight into Neocon history to avoid false assumptions. |
| quote: |
| January 6, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Era of Distortion By DAVID BROOKS Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality? I started feeling that way awhile ago, when I was still working for The Weekly Standard and all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of "neoconservatives" at the magazine had taken over U.S. foreign policy. Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans. The Asian press had the most lurid stories; the European press the most thorough. Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expos� on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators. The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles. We'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up. In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish") travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings. It's true that both Bush and the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace. But correlation does not mean causation. All evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions independently. Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a sentence that starts with "Neocons believe," there is a 99.44 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.) Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything. There's something else going on, too. The proliferation of media outlets and the segmentation of society have meant that it's much easier for people to hive themselves off into like-minded cliques. Some people live in towns where nobody likes President Bush. Others listen to radio networks where nobody likes Bill Clinton. In these communities, half-truths get circulated and exaggerated. Dark accusations are believed because it is delicious to believe them. Vince Foster was murdered. The Saudis warned the Bush administration before Sept. 11. You get to choose your own reality. You get to believe what makes you feel good. You can ignore inconvenient facts so rigorously that your picture of the world is one big distortion. And if you can give your foes a collective name � liberals, fundamentalists or neocons � you can rob them of their individual humanity. All inhibitions are removed. You can say anything about them. You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue. You will find books, blowhards and candidates playing to your delusions, and you can emigrate to your own version of Planet Chomsky. You can live there unburdened by ambiguity. Improvements in information technology have not made public debate more realistic. On the contrary, anti-Semitism is resurgent. Conspiracy theories are prevalent. Partisanship has left many people unhinged. Welcome to election year, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/opinion/06BROO.html |
Well, odds are that something will flame up in next four years. Who do we want at the helm the next time? That's why we have elections. I'm fed up to my ears with Orange Alerts and the like, but what can we do as individuals other than vote?
I don't doubt that Bush was waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on Iraq during his term. There was no victory when his dad was in office.
{{{smoke}}}
Excellent article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/14/opinion/14WED4.html
| quote: |
| Paul O'Neill, Unplugged, or What Would Alexander Hamilton Have Done? By ANDR�S MARTINEZ Published: January 14, 2004 Read Robert Rubin's recently released memoir and "The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new book on Paul O'Neill's time in the Bush administration, and a few things become apparent. The first is that Mr. O'Neill would have really liked having Mr. Rubin's job. Of course, Mr. O'Neill thought he was getting Mr. Rubin's job when George Bush appointed him Treasury secretary, but in fact he was only assuming the title. Mr. Rubin's job, as described in his book, "In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington," was to analyze an often mystifying world, alongside Alan Greenspan and an insatiably curious president, and to shape domestic and global economic policy accordingly. Mr. O'Neill, who had been a budget wiz in the Nixon and Ford administrations and a successful chief executive at Alcoa, was able to sift through economic data to his heart's content with his old pal, Mr. Greenspan. But he soon discovered that this was merely an academic undertaking. In addition to the damage that Mr. O'Neill did to himself with his erratic public statements, he was serving in an administration that was not eager to have facts get in the way of policies set by a "praetorian guard" of ideologues surrounding the president. Mr. O'Neill can't tell you what it feels like to steer the world economy. For that, read Mr. Rubin's book. Mr. O'Neill's is a woeful tale of what it feels like to sit in the office once occupied by Alexander Hamilton and be subservient to people like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. "We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process," Mr. O'Neill told Dick Cheney, his old friend from the Ford administration who had recommended him for the job early on. In this tale, the Treasury secretary repeatedly implores the vice president to foster a more open and rigorous policy-making process in the White House, but to no avail. These scenes are reminiscent of a spy thriller in which the protagonist warns the head of counterintelligence that there is an enemy mole in their midst, only to discover that his confidant is actually the mole. Long after the reader has figured it out, Mr. O'Neill finally realizes that Mr. Cheney is the leader of the inner circle, which keeps facts � whether about global warming, the deficit, steel tariffs or Iraq � from getting in the way of policy. Mr. O'Neill did manage, for a time, to head off talk of a tax cut on dividends. But when the issue comes up once more right after the midterm elections, and Mr. O'Neill again notes that the country cannot afford it, Mr. Cheney cuts him off: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due." To his credit, President Bush, who is depicted as having a hard time following the discussion, wonders at the same meeting whether he hasn't already given wealthy people enough of a break. That's when Mr. Rove chimes in that the president ought to "stick to principle." Mr. O'Neill came to feel that he, Christie Whitman and Colin Powell were essentially hired for cover by a president who had pledged to govern from the center, but really had no intention of doing so. Mr. O'Neill was a Nixonian Republican caught up in a Reaganite restoration. He had admired how President Bush's father, when faced with a dire fiscal outlook, had reneged on his "no new taxes" pledge. And while some Democratic liberals had viewed President Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline as a betrayal, for the likes of Mr. O'Neill it represented the triumph of Republican values. The new Treasury secretary and Mr. Greenspan shared concerns that even the bulk of the first round of tax cuts in 2001 could prove unaffordable if projected $5.6 trillion surpluses over the next decade turned out to be a mirage (as they did). That's why Mr. O'Neill, whose presidentially conferred nickname was downgraded over time from "Pablo" to the "Big O," tried to get Mr. Bush to agree to condition the phasing in of these cuts on the availability of surpluses. He failed. "I won't negotiate with myself," the president told his Treasury secretary, as if responsible economic stewardship was a compromise too far. The White House is upset that a departed cabinet member has provided such an intimate and devastating portrait of presidential decision-making � in an election year, no less. But Mr. O'Neill, who comes across as somewhat na�ve and politically tone-deaf in this thick stew of self-justification and insider revelation, also feels betrayed by a White House that discouraged any serious policy debates. Whether it's Mr. Cheney's energy task force, the supposedly independent commission on Social Security reform or the president's ridiculously scripted Waco economic summit meeting in the summer of 2002, the Treasury secretary continually registered his deep shock at what he rightly considered shoddy, if not dishonest, decision-making. "When you have people with a strong ideological position and you only hear from one side, you can pretty much predict the outcome," he says of the energy task force. Too often, the fix was in, as when steel tariffs were imposed, and when Mr. O'Neill's post-Enron efforts to make chief executives more accountable for their companies' misbehavior were thwarted by White House concerns about "the base." When Mr. Cheney finally called to fire his old friend in November 2002, the O'Neill account quotes him as saying, "We'd really like to do this in an amicable and gracious way." It was clearly too late to start down that road. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Vesa Why not clear this up by making a poll with the following alternatives: 1) I hate the USA, 2) the USA is OK, and I judge Bush based on his personal merits, 3) I don't care about the USA as long as they don't pull my country into anything  |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Well done, Dave. |
If someone as close as was O'Neill to the Bush administration says the things that are published in that book it means that this administration is one of the most mediocres in history, I don't know how after situations like this there is still people supporting this President
{{{smoke}}}
Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright © 2000-2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.