New Bush cabinet
Big Oil and military loyalists in key posts
By Fred Goldstein
At the very moment that the U.S. military is sinking deeper
and deeper into the quagmire in Iraq, President George W. Bush
is carrying out a purge of his administration and elevating
precisely those forces within the administration who were the
most vigorous advocates, supporters and defenders of this
bloody colonial adventure and the "unilateralist," "preemptive"
strategy employed to carry it out.
In this purge, Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, who
directly represent Big Oil and the military-industrial complex,
are strengthening their stranglehold on the summits of the
capitalist government--not only by appointing right-wing
elements, but by positioning loyalists to their narrow
governmental faction in key posts.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only high-level channel
into the Bush administration open to the "multilateralist"
imperialist moderates appealed to by John Kerry during his
election campaign, was marginalized in the administration long
ago. He has now been replaced by Condoleezza Rice.
Rice, an anti-Soviet cold-war intellectual who first came up
with Powell during the administration of the first George Bush,
is close to the current president and has had no real power in
the administration as national security adviser. Washington's
policy was determined largely by Cheney and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom warred with Powell over
military and political strategy. Rice deserted Powell in the
inner struggle and came down on the side of the
Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld axis in all crucial struggles.
It was Rice who talked about the "smoking gun" being a
"mushroom cloud" as the administration tried to stoke fear in
order to justify the Iraq war. She said that aluminum tubes
sighted in Iraq could only be used for nuclear weapons. And it
was Rice who appeared on the talk shows every week pushing
"preemptive" war. As such, she was a mouthpiece for the hawks.
At the State Department, she will have the same relationship of
dependence on Bush, Cheney and, to a lesser extent, Rumsfeld,
that she had as national security adviser.
Stephen J. Hadley, her chief aide at the National Security
Council, is taking her place as national security adviser to
Bush. Hadley was chosen by Cheney to be Rice's deputy. During
the administration of Bush senior, when Cheney was secretary of
defense, Hadley had been his undersecretary.
Hadley is most notable for two things. First, he has argued
for the development and use of "mini" nuclear weapons. His
policy speeches to this effect became the basis for the Bush
administration's notorious Nuclear Posture Review, submitted to
Congress on Dec. 31, 2001, in which the use of nuclear weapons
as integral to and continuous with conventional warfare was put
forward as doctrine. The first-strike use of nuclear weapons
against non-nuclear countries was also approved in that
document. (rightweb.irc-online.org)
Hadley's other service to the Bush administration was to
take the rap for "not catching" the fact--which he knew from
the beginning--that Bush was lying in his 2003 State of the
Union speech when he asserted that Iraq had purchased uranium
in Africa during the run-up to the war.
Cheney and Hadley form the cutting edge of the influence of
the oil giants and the military corporations inside the Bush
administration.
Big Oil pulls the strings once again
Cheney, as former CEO of Halliburton, has formulated energy
policy in collaboration with the oil industry and refused to
reveal the nature of the meetings he had with the oil tycoons.
The strategic position of Halliburton goes far beyond the fact
that it is 153rd on the Fortune 500 list and that it has gained
billions in no-bid contracts for Iraq. Halliburton, according
to the Multinational Monitor of May 2001, operates in 120
countries and has 7,000 customers. That was three years ago.
(See corporatewatch.org.uk/halliburton.)
The important thing is that those 7,000 customers include
the giant oil corporations, from Exxon/Mobil to Chevron/ Texaco
and Shell--the very corporations that dominate the Gulf and the
world imperialist oil industry. These are the corporations that
wanted to get their hands on Iraq, with the second-largest oil
reserves in the world. And Halliburton is the perfect nexus
between Big Oil, the Bush administration and the Pentagon.
Hadley, a Cheney appointee, is not just a right-wing
military intellectual. He is a principal in the Washington law
firm of Shea and Gardner, whose clients include Lockheed Martin
and Boeing. He serves on the board of ANSER Analytic Services,
based in Arlington, Va. A think tank specializing in "threat
assessment," its trustees include former Pentagon and CIA
officials along with "corporate officers from defense
contractors such as Raytheon and Bellcore." (rightweb)
The shift of Rice to the State Department and Hadley to
become Bush's national security adviser strengthened the hand
of the most aggressive elements within the U.S. ruling
class.
Bush also appointed his White House counsel, Alberto
Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.
Gonzales was counsel to Bush when the latter was governor of
Texas. As the chief White House counsel, Gonzales was the
author of a memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions were
"obsolete" and justifying torture of prisoners "on the
authority of the President of the United States as the
Commander in Chief." He supported setting up concentration
camps on Guan tanamo as the appropriate place for captured
prisoners because it was outside the jurisdiction of U.S.
courts. (Alan Berlow in www.slate.msn.com, June 15, 2004)
Before Gonzales learned to twist the law on behalf of Bush's
colonial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was inventing
new legal concepts on behalf of Bush the executioner in
Texas.
Gonzales helped Bush defy international law in the case of
Ireno Tristan Montoya, a Mexican national accused of murder in
Brownsville, Texas,in 1985.
Tristan proclaimed his innocence but did not speak English,
had no lawyer when arrested, and signed a confession that he
later said he thought was an immigration document. The Mexican
government protested that its consulate had not been informed
of his arrest in accordance with the Vienna Convention, which
the U.S. signed in 1969. It requires that foreign nationals
arrested in any country be granted a lawyer from their own
country.
On June 16, 1997, Gonzales, as Bush's legal counsel, wrote a
document to the State Department declaring that, since the
state of Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, it should
not be asked to determine if the convention had been violated.
Two days later, Tristan was executed.
It was hardly a skip and a jump from declaring Texas to be
exempt from the Constitution, which says that all states are
bound by treaties and conventions signed by the federal
government, to declaring the Geneva Convention "obsolete."
Goss purge of CIA
As the new head of the CIA, Bush has selected Porter Goss,
Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee and a
former agent in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s when
the senior George Bush was the CIA director. Goss is reported
to have been involved in trying to save Nicaraguan dictator
Anastasio Somoza from being overthrown by the Sandinistas. He
later became a business executive and then a Congressperson
from the Sarasota district of Florida. He has long connections
with both George H.W. Bush, the father, and Jeb Bush, the
brother and governor of Florida.
As head of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss came to
Bush's aid during the scandal over intelligence failures
connected to Iraq and Osama bin Laden, publicly declaring the
CIA to be "dysfunctional." This was at the moment that Bush was
trying to scapegoat the CIA and its director at that time,
George Tenet, for all the false intelligence, failures of
intelligence and lies that the entire administration had been
spreading about weapons of mass destruction, the alleged
Hussein-bin Laden connection, and so on.
Goss also initiated legislation on June 15 to allow the CIA
to investigate and arrest U.S. citizens--a complete break with
the established division of labor within the capitalist state
that designates the homefront as the turf of the FBI.
(Newsweek, Aug. 11)
This is part of the "reform" of the CIA as Goss carries out
a purge of the anti-Bush forces within the agency. According to
the Baltimore Sun of Nov. 14: "'The agency is being purged on
instructions from the White House,' said a former senior
official who maintains close ties to both the agency and the
White House. 'Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of
those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on
as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing
the president's agenda.'"
The closing off of the capitalist government to broader
political and economic factions in the ruling class is bound to
stoke discontent in the establishment. And rumblings are
already being heard in the pages of the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco
Chronicle, among others. But the moderate factions of the
ruling class sat through the first administration. They whined
and complained but, in the end, got behind the war. They are
all now hoping that Bush will pull out a victory in Iraq,
although they are rightfully pessimistic. If the Democrats, who
so far have been completely quiet and passive, do start to
fight back, it will be ineffective and will be because an
opposition is developing in the ruling class.
The labor movement, the anti-war movement and community
organizations must not wait for some ruling class opposition to
come to the rescue. First of all, the ruling class has shown
absolutely no inclination to really stop the Bush reaction.
They are either for it or are taking a wait-and-see
attitude.
In addition, it is one thing to put a right-wing government
in place and another thing to carry out a right-wing political
policy at home and abroad. Right now, the fact is that
Washington is facing resistance in Iraq, a strained military,
demoralization among sections of the troops, an economy that is
fragile, and large sectors of the population who are facing a
cruel, cold, hungry winter--particularly in the African
American, Latin@, Native and poor white communities.
The movement must show that it is not intimidated by the
mere appointment of right-wingers. Beginning mass mobilization
to struggle against the war and for the needs of the people can
change the entire political landscape and put the Bush-Cheney
forces on the defensive. It takes determination and initiative
but it can be done.
The Oct. 17 Million Worker March in Washington, D.C., showed
in microcosm the unity of the labor movement, the anti-war
movement, the community and the unorganized working class,
including immigrant workers. The MWM approach should be
expanded in the post-election period to encompass broader and
broader layers of the workers and the oppressed, until the
movement builds up the momentum it needs to push back the Bush
program and stop the war.
Reprinted from the Nov. 25, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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