Truth - Al Franken [89]
Sometimes when I’m feeling unmoored, I reach for the collected letters of Dwight Eisenhower—a Republican of a different era, and a different stripe. Here’s what Ike wrote about Social Security in a November 8, 1954, letter to his brother Edgar:
Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background),7 a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas.
Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
I think it’s too easy an out to say that George W. Bush is stupid. But it certainly was stupid of him to think that his election had anything to do with a mandate for Social Security privatization. As he found out the hard way, George Bush was the last person Americans wanted tinkering with Social Security.
Bush didn’t win the election because he was a Social Security president. He didn’t win the election because he was a Restore Terri Schiavo’s Feeding Tube president. He won because he convinced 51 percent of American voters that he, and only he, had what it took to be a war president.
12 Plan of Attack—Attack the Planning
In 1979, a young Pentagon staffer undertook the first thorough look at America’s strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region. The fruit of his labors was a classified report entitled “Capabilities for Limited Contingencies in the Persian Gulf.” The author, who inhabited the obscure position of deputy assistant secretary of defense for regional programs, made the case that the Gulf was important to the United States for very specific reasons:
We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The author was especially clear on that first reason, and went on to give it special emphasis:
The importance of Persian Gulf oil cannot easily be exaggerated.
Years later, the author of that study would make news once again by saying “fuck you” to me at a White House Correspondents Association dinner. But back in 1979, Paul Wolfowitz was much too small a fish to be invited to Washington’s most glamorous black-tie gala.1
Wolfowitz’s report raised some eyebrows. Most people who made it their business to worry about such things were worried that our oil supply might be cut off by a Soviet invasion of the Persian Gulf. Wolfowitz, however, placed his focus on a different concern: the possibility that “Iraq may in the future use her military forces against such states as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.”
It seemed far-fetched. Who would have the gall to order such an invasion? At the time, Iraq’s president was the colorless Hassan al-Bakr. But a month and a day after Wolfowitz submitted his report, a dashing young Saddam Hussein engineered the resignation of al-Bakr, who was also his cousin, and consolidated his power over the country he called home.
Ever since the British had created Iraq after World War I, the country had been riven by ethnic tensions between the majority Shia Muslim Arabs, the minority Sunni Muslim Arabs, and the Muslim, but non-Arab, Kurds, located mainly in the north. Saddam’s Sunni regime crushed dissent with an iron fist, a fist that, on occasion, emitted poison gas.
A year after the release of Wolfowitz’s report, Iraq was at war with neighboring Iran, whose ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shiite, was viewed by Saddam as a total Assaholah. This view was also held widely in the United States, where it formed the basis for much of America’s Middle East policy and a popular line of novelty T-shirts. Shortly after Saddam’s 1983 gassing of Iranian troops, President Reagan sent his Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to hold friendly talks with Saddam about how to “wipe” the Assaholah. As Rumsfeld reported