Tom Watson

The Cheney Scenario

The Bush 2004 team finally has the scenario it needs to shake up its fast-disappearing election hopes for the fall: Dick Cheney can be removed from the ticket for cause. In a story that has yet to receive big play on this long holiday weekend, Time magazine reports that the Vice President lied about whether he or close, high-ranking aides had any influence over huge contracts Halliburton received in the Iraq misadventure. Time obtained:

"... an internal Pentagon e-mail sent by an Army Corps of Engineers official—whose name was blacked out by the Pentagon—that raises questions about Cheney's arm's-length policy toward his old employer. Dated March 5, 2003, the e-mail says "action" on a multibillion-dollar Halliburton contract was "coordinated" with Cheney's office. The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the "authority to execute RIO," or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year. The e-mail says Feith approved arrangements for the contract "contingent on informing WH [White House] tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP's [Vice President's] office." Three days later, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton the contract, without seeking other bids."

This amounts to a smoking gun, and makes it more likely that Republicans unhappy with Iraq and the President's lackluster reelection campaign will begin internal pressure to dump the Veep in favor of a more well-liked, more mainstream Republican. Will the Bush team allow Cheney to be portrayed (accurately) as the corrupt, out-of-touch, war-hawking albatross of the '04 campaign? Or will it cut him and move on?

Of course, there's always this unlikely scenario... or this slightly more likely one. Is either more unbelievable, than this one from the Kerry camp?

UPDATE: This story was getting very little play in the U.S., but tons in the U.K. - my Parliamentary alter ego Tom Watson blogged it, as did Tim Ireland. Now I see Political Wire has picked it up. Does the story have legs?

Bravery Wasted

At the gates of the Iraqi town of Husaybah, the driver of the white Toyota Land Cruiser was holding a Mills Bomb, a British-designed hand grenade, when Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, 22, wrestled him to the ground. In one of the most moving accounts of the terrible war in Iraq, Michael Phillips of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday how the grenade rolled loose, and how Cpl. Dunham threw his Kevlar Marine helmet over the grenade - and his body over the helmet. The Marines whose lives he saved on April 14, believe that "Cpl. Dunham made an instantaneous decision to try out his theory that a helmet might blunt the grenade blast."

Dunham, who grew up in upstate Allegany County, made it back to the United States alive - but just barely. At the military hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, his parents faced their terrible decision: their son's brain was damaged beyond repair, and he would never regain consciousess. Phillips recounts:

The Dunhams spent a couple more hours with their son. Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee arrived and pinned the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in battle, on his pillow. Mrs. Dunham cried on Gen. Hagee's shoulder. The Dunhams stepped out of the room while the doctors removed the ventilator. At 4:43 p.m. on April 22, 2004, Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham died.

You cannot read this story - and by the way, you must read this story - and not feel terribly angry about the war in Iraq. Cpl. Dunham has been nominated for the Medal of Honor, the first Marine to be put forward in 11 years. He deserves the honor, his commander wrote: "I deeply believe that given the facts and evidence presented he clearly understood the situation and attempted to block the blast of the grenade from his squad members. His personal action was far beyond the call of duty and saved the lives of his fellow Marines."

The same day came the cold, military appraisal of the war by retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who served as George W. Bush's Middle East envoy and spent four years commanding U.S. forces in the Middle East:

In my view, it was a blunder. The president was not served well with strategy, planning, and decisions made from there. I think they misled him on what to expect— the rationale, the elements for the strategy, to the situation on the ground. It wasn't going to be a pie-in-the-sky welcome in the streets with flowers. Anyone who knew the region and knew the country knew what this was not going to happen.

iPod PDA?

While much of the speculation among Appleophiles revolves around color screens and video for the next generation of the fabulous iPod, I think its natural evolution moves more towards the mundane. Thanks to a $20 helper app, I now use my iPod as my portable contacts and calendar carrier - a poor man's PDA. I'll admit it, I can't stand carrying an appliance for every single function under the sun. But they'll pry my old school StarTac (the equivalent of the Clyde Puma in the cell phone world) from my cold dead fingers (or I'll chuck it when it finally dies). The classic black flip-phone works - it makes and receives calls. But in the past year or so, I've stopped using my Blackberry and ditched both Palms and a Pocket PC - making for a pricey little junk drawer in my house. These days, I'm using iPodSync, a nifty application that takes my Outlook calendar and contacts, and drops them onto my iPod. Since I listen to music almost obsessively as I travel, my next appointment is always handy. Sure, I give up perfecting a lame alternative script or tapping in new contacts and appoints - but isn't that what my laptop or, gasp, my notebook is for?

The .500 Club

Since today is an off day for the New York Mets, I thought it would be a good time to celebrate what may be a temporary and deserving plateau - a .500 record in late May. It's been a while. This year's team is a hobbled hodge-podge of talent, led by three aging starters - Tom Glavine, Steve Trachsel, and Al Leiter. The team lists a payroll of over $90 million, but that includes Mo Vaughn's ill-fated $17 million final year guaranteed contract, so this team is really closer to $70 million. Can they contend? Will Jose Reyes play meaningful games in mid-summer? Will Mike Piazza continue his offensive return to form from first-base?

Who knows - but it's great to wonder, at .500, in late May.

And now...

Watching the B-movie thriller 28 Days Later. Lonely survivor of a worldwide, blood-born rage virus wanders empty London streets. In a church, he comes across this, hand-scrawled on the wall in huge, hand-written letters, an ironic comment on societal failure:

The end is fucking well nigh.

Ah, the British wit. Of course, I thought of Iraq - 14 months later, the end is indeed pretty fucking well nigh. The pitiful episode of Ahmad Chalabi signals the beginning of the endgame, the countdown till the "roof in Saigon." We cannot win; "winning" was never a possibility - the broad, flat, golden policy upland of a "democratic Iraq anchoring a reformed Middle East." What a joke. What a disgrace. All that is left is some kind of withdrawal, some kind of reformulating of our policy, and the recriminations - the 2000's versions of the Church hearings are coming, folks.

When you find youself agreeing with Pat Buchanan, with George Will, with William Novak, with the Hudson Institute - get ready. The end is nigh.

Middle Class Votes

Are you a middle class American? Polls consistently show that about 90 percent of Americans identify themselves as middle class - whether they live on big spreads in Scarsdale our public housing in the Bronx. And while politicians talk about the middle class a lot, they genuinely seem to believe that there's a self-identifying "middle" between the poor and the wealthy. But how do pols vote on core middle class issues - the broader middle class, that is? What are the real issues? Why has "middle class" become a throwaway line for Democrats and Republicans of all stripes? Please check out the excellent Congressional scorecard developed by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, who whose board I am happy to serve. DMI does terrific work in progressive policy and is a much-needed voice on the left side of the ledger, balancing out the more successful, better-funded conservative think tanks.

War Crimes Trial

Saddam Hussein and some of his top henchmen sit in U.S. detention in undisclosed locations, awaiting trial for war crimes. But there is a prominent Washington DC lawyer who believes another national leader may face war crimes charges. The leader is President George W. Bush. The lawyer is White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. In a 2002 memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Reports Newsweek:

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote. "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote.

In our name, the American government is holding without charge and in often humiliating conditions, thousands of prisoners - some combatants, some terrorists, some bystanders. They have no redress, no legal protection, no legal status. And in our name, some are being tortured, and some subjected to conditions that lead to their deaths. And this is an Administration that has argued against adherence to the Geneva Conventions - and one reason for that argument was to protect Bush and his ministers from prosecution on war crimes charges by successor administrations.

In the end, says Newsweek, after strong protests from Colin Powell, the White House retreated. In February 2002, it proclaimed that, while the United States would adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, captured Taliban and Qaeda fighters would not be given prisoner of war status under the conventions. America's disgrace in the eyes of the world continues.

Jim Baker's War

Former Secretary of State James Baker was the great multi-lateralist American minister of the immediate post Cold War period. As Jason points out, Baker reacted to massive diplomacy changes with the mind of a strategist:

Baker's state department reacted brilliantly, never falling back on Cold War assumptions, seizing disasterous events and turning them into vehicles for the advancement of American interests abroad; and most of all, forging a kind of unprecidented diplomacy of international coalition-building that would later be used successfully by Madeliene Albright in the Clinton years.

So how ironic and disheartening for Baker must it be that his last big act on the public stage - presiding over the victorious Bush battle in Florida and the Supreme Court in 2000 - led to the dismissal of the American world view he so brilliantly espoused, and the undercutting of a successful system he created? Here's a report by his Baker Institute on the current state of affairs:

“The United States today lacks the capabilities in public diplomacy to meet the national security threat emanating from political instability, economic deprivation, and extremism, especially in the Arab and Muslim world."

So Jim Baker works his tail off to maneuver the son of the President he served into the White House in a deadlocked election. That son turns around and dismisses everything Baker has worked for in life. How sad.

Bruce vs. Bush

Word is that Bruce Springsteen is gonna try to bring Democrats to the Promised Land. The Daily News reports that Bruce may be planning a major free concert on Sept. 2 - just when President Bush is scheduled to be addressing the Republican National Convention in New York. A fascinating political tactic. Would it be in New York? In New Jersey, just across the river? Broadcast nationally on free television? And how much thunder would he steal from the President?

On the Beach

I'm riding Metro-North, 10:30 at night, listening to Patti Smith's vicious Gloria on my iPod. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. And here's what comes to mind:

Summer, 1978. Brendan, all of 13, talks his way into Joe Pops, a surf bar in Ship Bottom. For 15 bucks, pooled among myself, Chris, Doug, and Brian -- all older -- he walks out with a case and half of Miller. The bartender clears a 100 percent profit on stolen suds. We repair to the sandy dunes of Long Beach Township, on a beach roughly parallel to the Acme supermarket on the boulevard. I play my guitar for a bunch of wandering Jersey girls. They request Sweet Home Alabama. I know the chords, and attempt it. In Birmingham, they love the Governor?

But we're not really into southern rock anymore - the Allmans, the floppy leather fringed hats were last year. More restless now, no more blue sky, no sunny days. I throw in a little Springsteen, a stuttering Thunder Road. We get nowhere. See you guys tomorrow night? The spray of sand as they run away.

The Ramones play in the car we ride in, hitching a ride to Bay Village. On the boardwalk, hippies and The Dead - all decals and glitter jewelry, not California, not our thing. Patti Smith on the cheap portable record player in the rental on the beach. A shattered door, asleep on the floor on Alabama. We are frustrated, so out of synch, strangers on vacation from suburbia, stuck between street hockey and the back alley. Cherry bombs hurled from the dunes at seaside lovers. A six pack to oblivion. Back to Joe Pops. Rock Lobster. And the surf pounds on.