1999: Bush wanted war!

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Long before our bookstores were packed with copies of What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank's provocative look at how the right-wing wages its political wars against a fantasy "liberal power elite" and wins elections, over a year before George Bush was reelected by slipping the war and terror cards out from under the American deck, in a period when those color-coded alerts were just beginning to pour out, Arlie Hochschild wrote a prescient piece for Tomdispatch, posted on October 2, 2003, entitled "Let Them Eat War." She suggested then that the President, strutting the flight deck of American politics while flexing his G.I. Joe-style muscles, could win the blue-collar vote, and so the election of 2004, simply by feeding the heart of American darkness and a complex set of white, male, blue-collar fears.

I wrote by way of introduction at the time:
Here's one of the great unspoken questions of 2000, not to say 2003. Why do people support George Bush? Why, in particular, do significant numbers of working people support him when it seems so self-evident that he doesn't represent their economic interests? The strange thing -- to me at least -- is that, while questions like these are bound to be on the minds of all those who oppose the Bush administration, its policies, and its president, they are not questions often raised in public, no less publicly explored. So -- call it a conversation starter -- today's Tomgram considers the question of blue-collar support for Bush.

Hochschild's then novel piece touched a nerve. Letters poured in -- anxious, supportive, outraged -- not least from blue-collar guys. Of course, we know more now than we knew then about the way the Bush campaign fed American fears. Right now, we have, for instance, the British "smoking gun memo" (and the assorted supporting memos that have tumbled out after it) which convincingly showed that, before July of 2002, the Bush administration, amid a smokescreen of lies, had already irrevocably decided upon an invasion of Iraq and was only casting around for how to present that war and then use it for its own purposes at home and abroad.

An even more recent British bombshell indicates that British Prime Minister Tony Blair met George Bush at his Crawford ranch in April 2003 and agreed at that time to support an invasion of Iraq. In that same! period, we know, for instance, that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (and, undoubtedly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who would soon be putting imaginary Iraqi mushroom clouds over American cities in her public pronouncements, surely Vice President Dick Cheney, and probably the President himself) didn't take the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction explanation especially seriously. It was, as Wolfowitz admitted at the time, simply the lowest bureaucratic common denominator -- "…we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." -- for explaining a desperately desired war. We know as well that within a day of the September 11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld was already calling on his aide! s to round-up the usual suspects in considering where to strike back.

And now we know, as Russ Baker reports, that George Bush had been considering playing the Iraqi War card not just in April or July 2002, or even right after September 11th, 2001, but way back in 1999. It was then that Mickey Herskowitz, a ghost writer signed on to do George's official autobiography (the two were to split the profits), met privately about 20 times with the then-governor of Texas to discuss his thoughts.

"'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"... According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars."

"A successful if modest war": Keep that phrase – or perhaps "Let them eat a successful if modest war" -- in mind as our position in Iraq goes from terrible to worse.
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