Re: how The Decider decides
Chuck Grimes wrote:
I read this last night. It is a very good article.
On the other hand the quote gives a somewhat misleading example. Sure Bush is stupid beyond comprehension, but the real thrust of the piece goes to Cheney and his use of the OVP. It is alarming and chilling stuff. It helps explain why there seems to be such a disconnect between Bush who is incapable of abstract thought, and an executive branch apparatus run with such Machiavellian acridity.
Oh yes. If true, and it seems credible, then all those jokes about Cheney being the real president are no joke at all. He has a shadow NSC that can read the real NSC’s email, but not vice versa. At meetings, the Cheney rep always had the final word. Etc. Cheney’s inner circle must be the eight or nine people who run the country that Seymour Hersh talked about at the MLG last year.
It also provides the best explanation I’ve read of why the US invaded Iraq: to deny oil to China, which they see as a real strategic rival in the coming decades. After Iraq would come Iran. There’s a logic to this, but it’s psychotic logic: there’s nothing that would encourage a Chinese military buildup more than the sense that the US was trying to deny it oil. And it’s still not clear how “controlling” the Gulf states - and with the US unable to conquer Iraq, any greater ambitions look completely impossible - would deny the Chinese oil, since there are plenty of other places they could buy it from. Nothing short of a blockade could really accomplish that goal. I remember people arguing in the run-up to the Iraq war that it was motivated by classic American imperial strategy, but it looks more like the demented obsession of the Cheney cabal, and one that has turned to disaster. Which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t compound the disaster by fucking with Iran.
Doug