Springtime For Cheney

The suicide bombing at Bagram this morning capped off an extremely interesting week for the normally secretive Big Time. For now, his trusty ward Fredo seems to have taken the week off, while the eminence grise trots about the Pacific Rim, irritating and frustrating young and old alike. It's been quite a show, when you put it all together, as Cheney consistently insists that Britain's drawdown in Iraq -- and concomitant buildup in Afghanistan -- is proof of success. That no one in the American media sees fit to challenge him directly on such an incredible re-interpretation of facts and common sense tells us everything we need to know about how we got to this point.

And mere hours after putting the arm on an increasingly encircled Pervez Musharraf, the Bagram bombing, for which a reason for Cheney to even be at the base in the first place has yet to be plausibly conjured. Conventional wisdom might say that it's so he can get a "first-hand" view, even though, as with Iraq photo-ops, the safe zone is never breached. So for pure reconnaissance purposes, it's obviously better to just let people do their jobs and file their observations periodically. Everything changes when the boss comes by to look over your shoulder.

But the boss also has to have excuses from time to time to justify his excesses and harebrained schemes, his ploys and pretexts. And so it is here -- he shook down Musharraf, who can't reasonably be expected to do much of anything at this point -- the border is a sieve, and both the Pakistani army and the Waziristan civilian areas have sustained too many casualties to push the issue of border incursions and counter-insurgency ops. Musharraf sits on a seething anti-American population of 150 million, his army and intelligence have been in cahoots with Taliban and al Qaeda ringleaders since before 9/11, and Karzai is powerless to ensure security on his side of the border.

But Cheney went anyway, so that he could be seen leaning on Musharraf, who cannot afford to be seen as too compliant, but can also not afford to have a frustrated American public demand drone raids in those border areas. Cheney is a lot of things, but he is certainly not so dumb as not to know that he was very publicly picking a political scab.

So now I'm wondering which sorts of conspiracy theories might arise in the wake of the bombing. Did the ISI give their counterparts across the border a last-second heads-up that a bigwig was going to pass through? Would a deliberate, concerted effort at Bagram necessarily be targeted at a particular person, or is it more valuable to their cause to simply keep ruffling feathers, while showing their own people that they can still poke, that they're not "on the run" anymore? Remember that bin Laden (remember him?) stated a primary goal as inciting us to over-react and over-commit in the Middle East, expending lives and capital and leveraging a disproportionate cost from us. How's that gone so far? And that's not even taking into account this afternoon's Dow dump, and the subsequent panic selling at every major exchange around the world.

Then you have the almost-too-incredible-to-be-believed revelation that our foreign-policy geniuses have basically found a way to triple-cross ourselves, sans lubricant.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran.

....

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.”

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney.

It is not unreasonable in principle to decide that containing Shiism, given its minority demographic across the entirety of Islam, is in the U.S. strategic interest -- if we had made such a decision three years ago. But we have expended many lives, untold billions of dollars, and just about all our wolf cards ensuring that Iraq's new parliamentary government was anchored with a Shi'a power bloc, one led by a nationalist cleric commanding a large militia. How precisely do they plan to start asking for a do-over from all that? It is simply too late.

So instead, they've decided to build another story on their little house of cards. They are allowing themselves to be played by the Saudis at the very least. How else do you figure that any rational person would suppose that working with the country whence 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came, to fund radical fundamentalist militia groups from the sect responsible for the most American casualties in Iraq thus far, would somehow be a good idea? Hell, it barely qualifies as an idea, good or bad. We're essentially re-empowering the Salafis and Wahhabis who attacked us in the first place. If this does not demonstrate conclusively that we have no idea what the fuck we are doing there, I seriously don't know what will.

And, like practically every major bad idea that has sprung forth from the diseased forehead of this administration, the wellspring of these cockamamie schemes has been Cheney's office. Working in secret, so much so that even the full list of staff is unavailable to the public (which, you know, pays their fucking salaries and all), completely unaccountable, with a clear-cut strategy not only to accentuate the "unitary executive" theory, but to establish Cheney's OVP as a rump fourth branch of government, answerable only to one man, who may have been goaded just a little further down his private (inflicted on the rest of the world in policy) road to ruin this morning.