The Price of Loyalty

From the Suskind book:

P. 96

Beneath the surface was a battle O'Neill had seen brewing since the NSC meeting on January 30 (2001). It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department versus hard-liners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, who were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country.

Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset.

One document, headed "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," lists companies from thirty countries - including France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom - their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An atached document maps Iraq with markings for "supergiant oilfield," "other oilfield," and "earmarked for production sharing," while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine "blocks" to designate areas for future exploration.

...Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly. Rumsfeld, O'Neill recalled, was focused on how an incident might cause escalated tensions - like the shooting down of an American plane in the regular engagements between U.S. fighters and Iraqi antiaircraft batteries - and what U.S. responses to such an occurrence might be. Wolfowitz was pushing for the arming of Iraqi opposition groups and sending in U.S. troops to support and defend their insurgency.

...During his confirmation hearings, Powell had said that arming the Iraqi opposition would be logistically difficult and ultimately unsuccessful in toppling Saddam. Since then, Powell had discovered that he was outnumbered.

So, O'Neill marveled as he read the New York Times story, Powell had taken the battle public...

O'Neill had witnessed many State-versus-Pentagon struggles over the years, often among his own friends...But it was rare to have pitched combat of the sort launched in the first month of an administration....there seemed to be no apparatus to assess policy and deliberate effectively, to create coherent governance.

That's what happens when you have a system of governance that relies on a leader and your leader is a self-serving, self-indulgent idiot.

Although those documents mapping out the oil fields for snarking up by U.S. interests and "foreign suitors" have been a subject on the internet for many months, they didn't make headline TV news. Neither at the beginning of BushCo's misadministration, or at the war planning stages. By July of 2003, the documents were news - but barely.

Various incidents retold in the book make it clear that, from the beginning, there was a veritable free-for-all in the White House. One such incident was the very first State of the Union address.

A mid-level analyst at OMB had written an analysis of a surplus that concluded it couldn't be used to pay down the national debt, adding justification for it to be used as the basis of a tax cut instead. I can't help you with the details here, because I simply don't understand high finance (or low finance for that matter - other than I don't have any money, so I won't be purchasing anything today, thank you). But I can understand that the Treasury Department, headed by Paul O'Neil at the time, was not consulted on the issue, and the erroneous report was worked into the SoU address....

P. 109

Treasury staffers called the White House. Excerpts of the State of the Union, which included the flawed calculus, had already been disclosed to the press. It was too late.

O'Neill was incensed. How could the White House political staff "decide to do things like this and not even consult with people in the government who know what's true or not? Who the hell is in charge here?" he ranted. "This is complete bullshit!"

That night, Bush stood before the nation, described the state of the Union in the most important speech a president gives, in any given year, and said something that knowledgeable people in the U.S. government knew to be false.

I don't think O'Neill was the last of the cabinet members to sound the cry, "This is bullshit!"

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.