the bad of days

Before his public testimony to the 9-11 commission this week, Richard Clarke, former White House anti-terrorism advisor to several presidents including G.W. Bush, started a media firestorm with his blunt critique of the Bushies fumbling the war on terrorism and detracting from it with their obsession to invade and occupy Iraq.

The Bushwhackers responded in their usual way, though with more desperation than usual: they attacked Clarke's judgment, veracity, memory, sanity, and of course his motives. Only their calm-voiced communications director was anywhere near effective. The rest were shrill and confused, with Condi Rice looking and sounding like a wounded animal, and some White House flack comparing parts of Clarke's book to the X-Files. At first they tried to deny that any meeting took place between G.W. "Bring me the head of Saddam" Bush and Clarke, in which Bush instructed Clarke to find a connection between Iraq and al Qeda on 9-12. But by the end of the day enough independent corroboration has surfaced that this wasn't tenable any longer.

Clarke's critique is devastating in its details beyond the soundbites, as his testimony will likely reveal. Apart from his credibility (also attested to by independent interviewees), his account is of a piece with the revelations of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and others, including President Clinton: The Bushies were out to invade Iraq from the moment they took over. Though her revelations have been mostly overlooked, former Pentagon officer and staunch conservative Karen Kwaitkowski offers three reasons for this neo-con Rabid Right obsession, two of them having to do with the likelihood that, once sanctions were lifted, Iraq would be making big oil deals with European companies rather than the U.S. companies who finance and employ them, and the other was the one we offered some months ago: because they wanted a U.S. military base in the region, and it was becoming more difficult to keep the one in Saudi Arabia. (She says because of problems with the Saudis, but we wonder whether it wasn't to support the Saudi royal family, who felt vulnerable to internal dissent galvanized by the presence of the American base.)

This was the biggest story in a day of bad news for the Bushies. (For instance, former President Jimmy Carter attacked their Iraq policies with unusual bluntness, and yet another Republican Senator claimed that the evidence doesn't support the White House claim that Senator John Kerry is weak on defense.) But it was an even worse news day for America.

That's because of the Israeli assassination of the founder of the Palestinian Hamas. Israelis were spinning it as the elimination of their equivalent of Osama bin Laden. The Palestinians saw it as the assassination of a revered spiritual and political leader. Much of the world may simply have seen it as a helicopter hovering to fire a missile and blow apart an old man in a wheel chair as he left morning services at a mosque.

The assassination was roundly condemned by the United Nations and individual nations including Japan and Great Britain. But not by the Bush administration. Condi Rice even parroted the Israeli line that Hamas is a terrorist organization, therefore... it goes without saying that according to the Bush doctrine of good v. evil, any act of violence is permitted by those the Bushies designate as Good against that which they call Evil.

This is the outcome of absolutism, and of any violence-including pre-emptive war against a state that might be a threat in the future---justified by that absolutism. Israel can get away with this because the Bush administration actions have made such warfare legitimate. Notwithstanding the terrible violence inflicted on innocent Israelis by suicide bombers and terrorist attacks, which may have been promoted by the man they assassinated, the logic of absolutism doesn't stop at killing the worst. And the logic of violence that this absolutism unleashes makes it nearly impossible for the Bushies to morally condemn this action.

Apart even from the morality, and even from the escalation of violence which breeds more and greater violence, the Israeli action was politically catastrophic. The anger and depth of outrage it unleashed will have consequences for years to come. Palestinians declared that Israel had opened the doors of hell, and there is every reason to believe them. Specific threats were made against the United States for the first time, and they had better be taken seriously. If al Qeda and similar terrorist networks haven't already been deeply involved in Palestinian causes, it is very likely they will be now, and their expertise and resources will be eagerly sought.

At best the Bush administration blew this one by not keeping closer tabs on the Israeli government, even apart from the tacit encouragement and essentially the permission their own policies provide. At worst they were actively complicit. Then again, for all we know, it's all part of the plan to hasten the end of days, so the righteous may be lifted up, as the second coming comes to Jerusalem (maybe in a movie theatre showing "The Passion"), which the Bushies must hope will be before election day.

But assuming that doesn't quite come to pass, we may have just seen the precipitating event of the next deadly terrorist attack on America.