Any end justifies any means with D.C. wackos
Georgie Annie Geyer
05 August 2003
Deseret News
A11

WASHINGTON -- August is historically the "nutty season" around this 
impressionable city, when the sun is high over the yardarm and people sink 
to their lowest points of energy and elegance. But this August promises to 
be the nuttiest one yet. You think the administration finally has an arm 
around our problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Israel and Palestine? You 
suppose our leaders and their zealous courtiers, awake day and night to try 
to spy treachery in our midst, have finally settled down to some traditional 
methods? Guess again! Here are only a few points of reference about the 
state of this administration -- small, but important ones -- as August bears 
down on us: First, we had the ghost of Adm. John Poindexter hovering over 
the city like some operatic phantom of past Capitol crimes. This week he was 
orchestrating a program from the Pentagon that was so crackpot-crazy that 
for a few hours even congressional critics (amazingly) could barely find 
their voices.

When they regained their composure, a few of their words were "unbelievably 
stupid . . . immoral . . . ridiculous and grotesque." You do remember 
Poindexter? He was one of the infamous Iran/Contra players in the Reagan 
administration in the early '80s, always struggling to go around the norms 
and the law; finally he was convicted for lying to Congress about secret 
sales of arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to fund the 
Nicaraguan "Contras." His conviction was overturned, but the stain on his 
reputation, one might have thought, would remain. Instead, this recycled and 
unrepentant zealot became head of the Pentagon's Office of Terrorist 
Information Awareness under this administration, and this week unveiled a 
sinister scheme to set up a commodity market-style trading system in which 
investors would be able to bet on assassinations and terrorist attacks, 
especially against the United States. Not only would Americans be betting on 
the deaths of their fellow citizens before sitting down to a martini and an 
amiable lunch in local bistros, but even terrorists could earn money on 
their "knowledge" and "investments." Everybody would be happy! Fortunately, 
the outcry was so strong from Congress, which seems finally to be finding 
its voice, that the program was immediately withdrawn. Then we had Paul 
Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary who more than anyone is responsible 
for getting us into war in Iraq, returning from a visit there and proposing 
what some cynics here are calling the "flypaper" theory of war. You remember 
Wolfowitz? He's the one who promised that Americans would be coming home 
within a few months. But now Wolfowitz, who, like all the other zealous 
neocons who pushed this war, never served in any armed forces, says we need 
more Americans there, for longer periods, in order to lure the Iraqis to our 
troops. We, the flypaper! He, Dr. Strangeprograms! And all this time, 
innocent Americans, both military and civilian, have been there in the 
125-degree heat of the unbearable Iraqi summer, searching, searching, 
searching for the WMD (I don't know why I persist in thinking of them as 
"weapons of mad deception," but I do). But this week, a new story on this 
theme came out. Americans are finally interviewing representative numbers of 
Iraqi scientists, and they are all saying, in separate debriefings, that 
Saddam Hussein had indeed destroyed most of his weapons in the early 1990s. 
If this is true, and it looks more and more as though it is, then the 
reasons given for going to war were totally fraudulent. (Saddam's "programs" 
to create such weapons are NOT sufficient reason to have gone to war. If you 
want to see the best article yet on what the Iraqi scientists say about the 
weapons, look at Bob Drogin's article, "The Vanishing: What Happened to the 
WMD?" in the July 21 New Republic magazine.) Now it becomes a little tricky 
for the administration. On Aug. 1, The Washington Post published a 
fascinating article, "U.S. Shifts Rhetoric on Its Goals in Iraq, New 
Emphasis: Middle East Stability." It quotes a number of administration 
officials as saying that the central goal in Iraq all along was not really 
the discovery of WMD but the transformation of Iraq into the "linchpin" of 
the reformation of the whole Middle East. Lesson: If one excuse doesn't 
work, smilingly find another! Finally we turn to "This Week in Liberia," the 
little country on the west hook of Africa that was modeled after America and 
that is in the midst of horrible civil war. First, President Bush was going 
to try to help the beleaguered people -- but then his trip to Africa was 
over and the "Liberian problem" just didn't fit into the imperial 
presidential schedule. Now, after two years of lambasting the irrelevant 
United Nations, President Bush wants it, along with Liberia's West African 
neighbors, to go in. We will go in, the message now is, once the crisis is 
over and Liberians are no longer in mortal danger. Hey, buddy, thanks! What 
is the larger meaning for this symbolic week? I think there are two points 
to watch. One, the administration's policies are more and more characterized 
by a total lack of principle; to most of the zealots, ANY end justifies ANY 
means. And sheer power, at the service of their special-interest agendas, is 
the only arbiter of our place in the world. Two, and related to that, is a 
growing "irregularization" of America, where our armed forces have become 
more and more irregularized (the growth of less-controlled Special Forces, 
for instance) and where American policy adheres to our leaders' emotions and 
needs of the day rather than to the rules, regulations and institutions of 
the traditional American political system. Poindexter is gone (again), and 
that is one down -- but his imaginative spirit stays with us. 

Universal Press Syndicate