Post-Iraq Monday Morning Quarterbacking - Some Context...

Today as I read and thought about the Obama bashing by unapologetic neo-cons, republican chicken hawks and “big stick” foreign policy Monday morning quarterbacks over the recent spasm of tribal violence in Iraq I was struck by the extent to which the Bush family has been involved in some of the most disastrous and stupid military interventions and belligerent American forays into 19^th century imperialism of the last 30 years.  It’s a remarkable and largely ignored legacy of foreign policy blunders and missteps so blatant and clumsy that it’s easy to dismiss them as the terrible results of a Northeastern prep school dorm dick measuring contest but which, upon examination, are so noxious and sinister as to provide overwhelming evidence that this one family may constitute a criminal cabal to rival the Gambinos or Gottis or any 20th syndicate imaginable.  Now as faint but unmistakable voices can be heard whispering for Jeb Bush to emerge from under his sheltering rock and come to the rescue of a faltering republican president field, it is an unsettling thing to ponder another royalist Bush bringing his tiny penis and hyper-drive hubris to the White House.

For all his bookish Yale-via-Amherst affectations, George H. W. Bush had been director of the CIA during the dying days of the Ford administration and grabbed the spinning steering wheel as the agency was threatening to careen over a cliff after an in-depth congressional investigation into its dirty and largely illegal activities dating back to Nixon’s first term and the coup d’etat in Chile among other things. At the time Bush was Ambassador to the United Nations.  He decided to run for the republican nomination for president in 1979 but ran into the amiable dunce, Ronald Reagan, and in the end settled for the Vice Presidency, a move I always felt was orchestrated by behind the scenes power brokers scared shitless of Reagan’s addled but good natured somnabulance.  Bush became Reagan’s man behind the scenes and the quasi-legal and unethical fun began almost immediately.

First the Reagan/ Bush administration armed Saddam Hussein to the teeth in his war against the evil Iranians, treating him like a vicious pit-bull of a surrogate so as to punish the unruly mob of mullahs and fanatics still beating their collective chest over the capture of our embassy and the turning of Jimmy Carter into a drawling gelding.  Much of this arms trafficking was illegal at the time and in a deep and profound irony, was the wellspring of Saddam’s mustard gas weapons of mass destruction and surely he’s somewhere right now kicking himself for taking that phone call.  The notorious “slaughter of his own people” that was a high profile justification for turning him into Dr Evil with a mustache was a result of our supplying him with the means to do so, a disgusting bit of truth that was somehow ignored in the bellicose days leading up to both wars with Iraq to follow.

In the meantime, in our own hemisphere, we had a decade of slaughter and genocide carried out by our latino surrogates in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala until the Sandinistas ruined everything by shipping our boy, Anastasio Somoza, to Miami and uniting Nicaragua into a socialist republic.  Thus began the foul saga of the Contras in Nicaragua and the collateral damage to all of Central America that followed our panicked and illegal intervention and determined attempt to get rid of them.  Bush was in this up to eyeballs, despite his subsequent pleading that he didn’t know anything about what Ollie North was doing in the basement of the White House for 6 years.   Calling the vicious Contras “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers” in an overheated blast of hyperbole intended to obscure their routine massacres of innocent civilians, Bush and the other beady-eyed fascists of the Reagan administration spent the 80’s futilely causing havoc and destruction on countries simply trying to get rid of medal-bedecked crackpot dictators and succeeding with the persistence only a home grown revolution can engender. 

Not content with illegal and strategically questionable intervention in our own hemisphere, the Reagan/Bush team also decided to send the marines into Lebanon where 241 of them died in a horrendous bomb blast that not only drove the marines out, it led to the subsequent invasion of Grenada, the single most illogical and pointless use of military force in the history of the Western Hemisphere and the worst movie Clint Eastwood ever made.  This cynical parlor trick of an intervention to ostensibly save a handful of college students was so clearly meant to distract the public from the Lebanese debacle that even the mainstream press alluded to it as sleight of hand.  Semper fi indeed…

As the decade came to a close and Bush began his own campaign for the presidency, his dirty little relationship with cartoonish thug, Manny Noriega began to receive the uncomfortable but typical media scrutiny of any presidential candidate.  As Wikipedia explains, “Although he worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to restrict illegal drug shipments, he was known to accept a very significant amount of financial support from drug dealers themselves simultaneously,^[5] because he facilitated the laundering of drug money, and through him they received protection from DEA investigations due to Noriega's special relationship with the CIA.^[7]"

The inconvenient part of this was Manny’s refusal to promise to keep his mouth shut after a series of Iran-Contra connection exposes threatened to blow the lid off his role as fixer and bag man so he had to go.  Again, from Wikipedia…

"In 1988, Elliot Abrams and members of the Pentagon began pushing for U.S. invasion, but Reagan refused, due to Bush being tied to Noriega through his previous positions with the CIA and the Task Force on Drugs, and their negative impact on Bush's presidential campaign.  Pressure mounted on Bush, as the media labeled him a "wimp" for failing to aid Panama amidst his campaign rhetoric that called for a tough stand against known drug traffickers.^[5] Bush declared that the U.S. would not negotiate with a known drug-trafficker and denied having any knowledge of Noriega's involvement with the drug trade prior to his February 1988 indictment, although Bush met with Noriega while Director of the Central Intelligence, and was the Chair of the Task Force on Drugs while Vice President."

Somehow the media couldn’t or wouldn’t connect the dots and after a quick invasion Manny was surgically removed and ended up in the Miami county jail, spending the rest of days shouting in vain through the bars on his cell. 

How is it that the Bush family’s public lives have been to intertwined with a series of high profile dictators and clownish characters like Noriega, Somoza, and Saddam Hussein?  Arguably the high point of Bush senior’s presidency was the first Gulf War, on its face a noble undertaking meant to liberate Kuwait but in reality just another dance with the devil between Bush and Saddam, who didn’t like being pushed around by a pencil-neck like Bush and wouldn’t stay in line so he had to be slapped down by the 82^nd Airborne.  Inconvenient references to Bush’s role in providing Hussein with the capability we all now fear was again overlooked or shouted down by jingoistic cheers from the mainstream press.

This finally leads us to George the Dull and his completely illogical and trumped up invasion of Iraq. After the 9/11 bombings, in a petulant attempt to regain the family honor and a fruitless quest to find his father’s balls, George and the aging band of cold warriors itching for a chance to engage the forces of evil somehow, somewhere, decided to make an example of Saddam and simultaneously kick somebody’s ass.   Sadly, like the elusive WMD’s, the missing balls were never found.   Perhaps they were just a legend to begin with – maybe the Bush family saga is one where the balls never existed in the first place and their war-mongering and frat-boy hubris was just a natural outgrowth of their anger at the futility of the search. 

Whatever the case may be, republican bleating about Obama finally being able to extricate us from the Iraqi tar-pit should be taken in the context of 30 years of systematic and cynical republican foreign policy madness.  As history will no doubt confirm, we should all be celebrating this one tiny victory and thinking carefully about how we really want to conduct ourselves in the next 30 years.  And praying fervently that Jeb Bush stays on the sidelines…