Is Condi cracking the whip?

Believe me, Condi, this time I’m on your side. I have nothing against dominatrices*. Even the notable Katrina vanden Heuvel referred to your “dominatrix black boots” in her April 30 post, The New Cold War.

And way back in February of 2005, at KorlaPundit.blogspot.com, the blame was squarely placed on the Washington Post for linking your name to “dominatrix.”

Why am I on your side? Because it looks like I was wrong when I posted this on May 25, speculating that in a battle between you and Vice-President Dick Cheney, he would win. If you’re cracking the whip and it’s working, more power to you!

The mainstream media may have it right this time. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, U.S. Not Pushing for Attack on Iran, Rice Says. From Madrid: “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought today to minimize any sense of division within the Bush administration over Iran after the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency delivered a pointed new warning against what he called the “new crazies” pushing for military action against Tehran.

“The President of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course,” Ms. Rice said here. 'That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, and by the vice president of the United States.'”

For those of you who aren’t sure about the impact of bloggers on the mainstream media, the article adds, “Reports about hawkish statements by members of Mr. Cheney’s staff first surfaced last week in The Washington Note, a blog run by Steve Clemons of the left-leaning New America Foundation. The report has alarmed European diplomats, some of whom fear that the struggle over Iran’s nuclear program may evolve into a decision by the Bush administration to resort to force against Iran.

“In interviews, people who have spoken with Mr. Cheney’s staff have confirmed the broad outlines of the report, and said that some of the hawkish statements to outsiders were made by David Wurmser, a former Pentagon official who is now the principal deputy assistant to Mr. Cheney for national security affairs. The accounts were provided by people who expressed alarm about the statements, but refused to be quoted by name. "

The blog referred to above is the one I posted about on May 25.

And today, in the Washington Post article, Cheney Backs Diplomacy on Iran Program, Rice Affirms confirmed Condi’s claim that she has reined Cheney and his acolytes in.

So I’m relieved. In yesterday’s post, Steve Clemons described Condi Rice as one of “[t]he constructive players in the administration." And Steve is pleased, because today he posted Reverberations about the mainstream media picking up on his previous post about Cheney’s possible plotting to do an “end run” around Bush to provoke a war with Iran.

*Sidebar: I’ve only met one dominatrix in my life, a likeable woman, demurely dressed in white, from a perky hat to a well-tailored jacket and pants with a pink scarf around her neck. So I didn’t have any negative feelings later when I saw her perform at an event (see photo below).

(photo of Condi in leather – courtesy of KorlaPundit.blogspot.com)

Condi, Condi, how could you?

Former CIA director George Tenet’s “tell all” book, At the Center of the Storm- My Years at the CIA, was released yesterday. Giving us a sneak preview of what's in the book, on April 28 MSNBC reported Tenet: White House eyed Iraq long before 9/11.

Are we surprised that Condi Rice made sure she was on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Sunday morning talk show so she could deny that Bush had plans to attack Iraq even before 9/11? Juan Cole's Monday morning post, Rice: Bush didn't want war is well worth reading because he juxtaposes Condi’s comments to Wolf with earlier reports that make it clear that Bush had his eye on Iraq long before 9/11:

Condi Rice on Sunday denied allegations by former CIA director George Tenet that Bush came into office determined to have a war against Iraq.

This is the interview by Wolf Blitzer of CNN:

QUESTION: Because you remember Paul O'Neill, the first Treasury Secretary, where he wrote in his first book, The Price of Loyalty with Ron Suskind, and what Ron Suskind later wrote in his own book, The One Percent Solution, that the Bush Administration came in with a mindset to deal with what they called unfinished business with Saddam Hussein.

SECRETARY RICE: That is simply not true. The President came in looking at a variety of threats. We then had the September 11th events. The September 11th events led to a kind of reassessment of what the threats were. But in the entire period after the President became President, he was trying to put together an international coalition that could deal with Iraq, first by smart sanctions, smarter no-fly zones, then by challenging Saddam Hussein before the Security Council to meet the just demands of the Security Council, and ultimately by having to use military force. But this was an evolution of policy over a long period of time. Of course the President came in concerned about Iraq. President Clinton had used military force against Iraq in 1998. We had gone to war against Iraq in 1991. But the idea that the President had made up his mind when he came to office that he was going to go to war against Iraq is just flat wrong. '

But here is what Bush's ghost writer Mickey Herskowitz reports Bush saying during an interview when Bush was still governor of Texas in the late 1990s:

' “He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.” '

So that was 1999.

Then we have this account from May, 2000, by journalist Osama Siblani, who met with Bush in Troy, Michigan when he was campaigning for the Republican nomination:

' OSAMA SIBLANI: I met with the President, and he wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and gathering threat against the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You met with the President of the United States?

OSAMA SIBLANI: Yes, when he was running for election in May of 2000 when he was a governor. He told me just straight to my face, among 12 or maybe 13 republicans at that time here in Michigan at the hotel. I think it was on May 17, 2000, even before he became the nominee for the Republicans. He told me that he was going to take him out, when we talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq. . .And then he said, ‘We have to talk about it later.’ But at that time he was not privy to any intelligence, and the democrats had occupied the White House for the previous eight years. So, he was not privy to any intelligence whatsoever. He was not the official nominee of the Republican Party, so he didn't know what kind of situation the weapons of mass destruction was at that time. '

Then let us come to January, 2001, when the Supreme Court had installed Bush in power. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill wrote in his memoirs of the very first Bush cabinet meeting:

'"The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone ... Rumsfeld and [Joint Chiefs chair Gen. H. Hugh] Shelton, he said, 'should examine our military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq ... Ten days in, and it was about Iraq."
O'Neill specifically said that Bush instructed Rumsfeld to look at military options and how it might look to use US ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq.How much clearer could it be that Tenet is absolutely right that there was never any serious debate about the merits of 'taking out Saddam' in Bush's inner circle?

For more evidence that the fix was in with regard to Bush and action against Iraq, see my "The Lies that Led to War" in Salon.com.

Posted by Juan @ 4/30/2007 06:35:00 AM

Glenn Greenwald’s Monday post describes the smear campaign that will now be waged against Tenet: “George Tenet has commmitted the crime in his book of identifying many of the neoconservatives responsible for some of the worst falsehoods and most egregious errors leading to the disaster in Iraq. And it is therefore now time for the full-on character smear. What neoconservatives understandably fear more than anything are facts which reveal the central and highly corrupt role they played in this disaster, and nothing prompts character assassinations as vicious as the disclosure of such facts.

Appropriately enough, Bill Kristol kicks off the campaign by seizing on two minor factual errors in Tenet's book -- including one where Tenet had the temerity to suggest that Richard Perle was a key figure in advocating an invasion of Iraq almost immediately after 9/11 (perish the thought) -- in order to suggest that Tenet is a serial liar. Asks Kristol, giving new meaning to the pot-and-kettle cliche: ‘How many other facts has George Tenet invented?’"

What is so amazing to me is that those who lie often get away with pinning the liar label on the truthtellers.

(photo of Condi Rice: AlexandraJason.com)

More "blowback": State Department reports 30% rise in terrorist attacks

Yesterday’s post described Russia’s reaction to the plan to install a new U.S. missile defense system in Europe, a consequence I describe as "blowback."

This morning, I read a McClatchy Newspapers article, Annual terrorism report will show 29% rise in attacks. Due to be released next week by the State Department despite Condi Rice’s efforts to delay it, the report will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, “almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan….the figures for Iraq and elsewhere are limited to attacks on noncombatants and don’t include strikes against U.S. troops."

And, "The report can be expected to be used as ammunition for both sides in the domestic battle over the Iraq war. President Bush and his aides routinely call Iraq the 'central front' in Bush's war on terrorism and likely will say that the preponderance of attacks there and in Afghanistan prove their point. But critics say the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have worsened the terrorist threat.”

You decide.