Killer Politics (14 page)

When you consider China's aggressive pursuit of oil reserves, it suggests that there is potential trouble ahead between our nations unless both countries can make the switch from fossil fuels to green energy quickly. Globally, can we produce enough green energy to decrease the demand for oil? The answer to that question will have much to say about whether the coming decades will be peaceful or full of conflict.

This situation is frustrating to me and harkens back to what I said in the early pages of this book. As a nation, we have to “fly ahead of the airplane.” We have to have a long-range domestic and global strategy. Jimmy Carter called for energy independence in the 1970s, but today, we are more dependent for oil than ever on repressive countries that we have enriched and empowered. And they like our dollars more than they like us. Meanwhile, from a strategic standpoint, China is doing all the right things.

Fareed Zakaria,
Newsweek
columnist and one of the most astute observers of global politics, wrote, “China is also well aware of its dependence on imported oil and is acting in surprisingly farsighted ways. It now spends more on solar, wind, and battery technology than the United States does. Research by the investment bank Lazard Freres shows that of the top 10 companies (by market capitalization) in these three fields, four are Chinese. (Only three are American.) It is also making a massive investment in higher education.”

As Americans, we have to come to grips with the weakness of our political system when it comes to long-range planning. The parties in charge must find common ground and common goals that we can pursue without interruption by the election cycle. This is what China has done, and China is gaining ground fast. The Chinese will prevail unless we can unite as a country.

I believe that we have the right guy at the helm right now, but we have an opposition party more invested in his failure than in America's success. The divide in our country today is every bit as serious as it was in the Civil War. We are not shooting at one another, but we are bring
ing ourselves down just the same. As a voter, you have a huge responsibility to put into office people who can revive the art of compromise. United we stand. Divided we fall.

This is not about nationalism. I just know in my heart that in order for this to be a better world in which people can live in a dignified manner, America must succeed. We are still the world's last best hope. In spite of the many flaws in our system, at the heart of it is the Constitution, a road map for a better world.

How Reckless Fiscal and Foreign Policies Almost Sank Us

I SAT UP ASTONISHED WHEN I HEARD THE NEWS THAT BARACK OBAMA
had won the Nobel Peace Prize. As Bill Maher put it, “How hard can it be to get a black professor and a white cop to sit down for a beer?” Kidding aside, it appeared to me that the president won the award less than a year after his election for the transformational effect he has had in America and around the world.

Set aside the bitter conservative negativity for a moment, and you can see what history will choose as a defining moment for this country. Not only did we elect an African-American, but the election was also a repudiation of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the insidious effect they were having on our country and the world. I felt like the Dixie Chicks—eventually, I grew ashamed of my president. I don't ever want to go there again. Even though I have been angry, disappointed, and frustrated with Barack Obama during his first year in office, I cannot imagine a time when I will ever be ashamed of him.

The Nobel Peace Prize was also a repudiation of the dangerous negativity of the conservative right in America. Naturally, they sneered when the American president was announced as the winner.

On
Saturday Night Live,
Seth Meyers reported, “Republican Committee chairman Michael Steele [a black man] criticized President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win, asking, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?' Well, for starters, Michael Steele, if it weren't for Obama, you wouldn't have
your
job.”

The Republicans have all the political subtlety of a musk ox. This is the party that produced Karl Rove, who used a smear campaign in the South to suggest that John McCain's adopted black daughter was an illegitimate love child. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour proudly supports the state flag, which incorporates the Confederate banner. South Carolina continues to fly the Confederate flag on its capitol grounds. And Nixon's divisive “Southern Strategy,” and its veiled racism, remains alive and well.

Six months into his administration, anyone could see that the tactic of the Republicans, bereft of any real solutions to the nation's ills, was to try to discredit Obama at every turn, whether it was justified or not. Politically, they acted like ill-tempered teenagers throwing a tantrum. By this point, they are in danger of losing any remaining credibility.

Senator James Inhofe, the Republican from Oklahoma, said, “This [Nobel Prize] just reemphasizes how this president has moved the United States from a foreign policy of strong national defense to one based on multinational cooperation. That is the kind of change that the Nobel committee believes in.”

Though he meant it as an insult, Inhofe was only partly wrong. One of the most important things the president did in his first year was to reach out to countries snubbed by the previous administration. What Inhofe got wrong was the suggestion that Obama is looking to weaken national defense. To the contrary, by showing a willingness to cooperate and employ diplomacy, Obama did something historic. He used common sense instead of saber rattling. But you can see how the whole concept of cooperation might confuse a Republican like Inhofe.

Global politics are a lot like golf. You have to use the right club for the right situation. The Bush administration's response to every situation was to pull out the driver—even in the sand traps. Obama has shown a willingness to use a pitching wedge and a putter. By shelving a defensive missile shield in eastern Europe, something Russia viewed as provocative, Obama and America sent a message that we are serious about peace and nuclear arms reduction. With so many pots boiling over—so many crises—the implications of such visionary actions will not be broadly understood for years, but I believe that Obama is trying to take the essential steps now to minimize the chance for catastrophic global conflicts in the future. He understands that the days of the United States being able to dominate as the big kid on the block are gone. America may have a superior military, but global cooperation is the best weapon against rogue states and terrorists.

With the global financial crisis at full boil when he took office, it was easy to lose sight of the larger global mess Barack Obama inherited. George Bush left two unfinished wars behind. Despicably, his administration perpetrated a sales job for the Iraq War that was predicated on bad intelligence and deceit. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no chemical weapons. There was no yellowcake uranium from Niger. Despite the fact that most Americans supported a war on al-Qaeda's network in Afghanistan, the administration pushed the issue along with what turned out to be a false premise.

In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, less than six months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush told a jittery nation, “We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities” in caves used by al-Qaeda. Two years later, the Bush administration admitted that no such diagrams had been found. But by then, they had support not only for the Afghanistan War but to go into Iraq as well, presumably as a reaction to terrorism. Of course we know now that the neocons were looking for a “New Pearl Harbor” to get the public behind a war and what was
viewed as unfinished business in Iraq. This was no secret. The right wing think tank Project for the New American Century published a treatise on the subject prior to 2000. Ten members of the think tank were involved in the Bush II administration, including Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

It's interesting to see how the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of democracy over communism forced a rethinking of global strategy. Suddenly, America was the world's lone superpower. In 1992, Wolfowitz, along with Cheney's former chief of staff (and later convicted felon) Scooter Libby, wrote a new mission statement, which was later rewritten by Dick Cheney himself. The original draft was leaked to the press and may still be found on the PBS website.

It said, “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. [This]
requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.
” The policy outlined other security concerns:
“access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil,
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking” (emphasis mine).

If necessary, the United States should not be shy about taking unilateral action, the document said, adding that what is most important is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and that “the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in a crisis that calls for quick response. That is the plan the Bush-Cheney White House followed right into Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cavalier attitude with which Bush and Cheney went to war in Iraq was both criminal and vacant of morality. As a nation, we have lost sight of what war really is all about. It is too easy to become numb or oblivious to the heartbreak of war, and that isn't good.

I found it deplorable that when President Obama greeted the returning bodies of eighteen troops killed in Afghanistan, Liz Cheney suggested it was for publicity. When her father, Dick Cheney, and President Bush had done the same thing, she said, there had never been cameras—except neither Bush nor Cheney
ever
honored fallen American soldiers by meeting the plane and watching the unloading of the caskets as Obama did while he was contemplating sending more troops to Afghanistan. President Obama did an honorable thing—what every commander in chief should do: look the families of the fallen in the eye.

Equally as deplorable as Liz Cheney's comments were those of Big Daddy Dick Cheney, rising from a crypt in an undisclosed location to accuse the president of “dithering” on the issue of troop increases. My colleague the great Chris Matthews opined on MSNBC's
Hardball
that perhaps Cheney should have “dithered” before sending troops into Iraq in an unprovoked war that placed American troops in the middle of a civil war. For the record, those weren't rose petals in the streets, Mr. Cheney. They were pools of blood.

WHAT ABOUT AFGHANISTAN?

The tragedy of Afghanistan is that after routing the Taliban and driving out al-Qaeda, Bush too quickly turned his focus to Iraq—the real prize—and began pulling assets from Afghanistan for the buildup to the Iraq War. So by the time Obama took office, the Taliban had reasserted itself, and America was faced with the prospect of essentially “rewinning” the Afghanistan War, which forced President Obama to add another 35,000 troops to the 68,000 already there. NATO also added 7,000 troops to their 39,000 troops already in Afghanistan.

But increasing troop levels is a treacherous gambit, too. It's hard not to see the war becoming a bloody sinkhole like Vietnam. American casualties, more than eight hundred in November of 2009, continued to mount under a resurgent enemy.

They call Afghanistan the place where empires go to die. The Soviet Union crumbled after ten years there. The last successful invaders were the Mongols in 1221, so unless you've got Genghis Khan suiting up, it could be rough going. The United States has been in Afghanistan since 2001. Bush failed because he didn't have the courage to ask the American people for the overwhelming force needed not only to win but
hold and stabilize
the country. Instead, he moved on to Iraq, leaving Afghanistan to fester like an open wound.

A report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2009 said, “The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

The report goes further, damning Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration for not sending in the snipers, special forces, and other soldiers to finish off that bastard bin Laden when we had him cornered. This was more than a mistake in my mind. It was incompetence. While bin Laden, convinced he was about to die, prayed, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld dithered.

The report reads, “Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines.”

While we're at it, let's discuss the “yeah but” response I can already hear from Republicans that Bill Clinton had his opportunities to take out bin Laden, too. As a matter of record, cruise missiles were fired into Afghanistan in 1998 to get bin Laden, but it turned out he wasn't there. This was in response the bombing of U.S. African embassies in Dar es
Salaam and Nairobi earlier in 1998 that killed more than two hundred, including twelve Americans. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that after the failed missile strike, Clinton ordered the CIA to try to capture bin Laden. Later in 1998, Clinton decided against another cruise missile attack on Kandahar, Afghanistan, because bin Laden was located near a mosque and it was feared the mosque might be struck and as many as two hundred civilians killed. Clinton's last opportunity came in 1999, during his final days as president, when bin Laden was falcon hunting in Afghanistan. A strike was called off because bin Laden was with senior officials of the United Arab Emirates, among America's closest allies in the Persian Gulf. Clinton had to decide whether or not to take out bin Laden and almost certainly kill the UAE officials, and then leave the fallout to the incoming president, George W. Bush.

That was the rationale. Bill Clinton told Bush that not getting bin Laden was his biggest regret, and he warned Bush that al-Qaeda would be a top priority, a warning we know Bush ignored. Now President Obama is charged with cleaning up the mess.

The long-range Obama plan is to train an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 by 2011, but other strategic estimates suggest that a force of 325,000 will be needed. It's a tall order. It has taken six years to produce 250,000 soldiers in Iraq.

Americans, fueled by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks, largely felt that this was a justified war, but in retrospect, I can't help but believe that had Al Gore been president on 9/11, our response would have been more measured and more successful. And I think he would have stopped reading
The Pet Goat
after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Bush got into a war without any plan for an end game, and then he compounded his mistake by diverting American resources from Afghanistan for the war in Iraq, essentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Before we go any further, we have to define what we can call success in Afghanistan. Are we nation building? Certainly we will be well
served by helping rebuild infrastructure in Afghanistan, which we quite famously failed to do after covertly supporting the Afghan effort to drive the Soviets out in 1989. Historians will always contemplate whether a small investment in schools and other infrastructure might have kept the ravaged country from becoming a breeding ground for terrorism. We missed an opportunity to create an ally in a strategic part of the world.

So, at this point, how do you stabilize the country in light of the divisions within it? There was a civil war going on before we invaded. On one side you have the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance militia, which is recognized by the United Nations as the Afghan government, aligned with the Karzai government in Kabul, and on the other the tenacious and religiously repressive Taliban, the former government that just won't stay defeated.