O’Neill bashed for telling truth
Last weekend was a long one for the most powerful man in Washington, the unelected president, Karl Rove. For the first time in awhile, he seemed off his game, which has been to make sure every policy decision made by President Bush wins votes.
Rove was born to political warfare, a gifted general who spends hours and hours each day talking with the GOP power structure and its constituents. By such personal research, he senses the impact of any White House policy.
He tests for limits. How much can the White House move toward a planned announcement without drawing the fire of the passionately loyal evangelicals? Even though there is no other party for them, Rove courts the leaders to make sure he is still on firm ground.
Apparently, he didn’t see Paul O’Neill’s charge coming. I can picture Rove reeling around his powerful Arabian (whoops make that a Tennessee Walker) to marshal his troops but his preliminary counter-charge was weak and totally emotional.
Through White House sources, the former Treasury Secretary was characterized as a man who doesn’t know anything about foreign policy and should not have criticized the president or his administration. Well, that still meant O’Neill was not wrong.
Then came the second emotional barrage: O’Neill has stabbed the president in the back. Hmm. Not much there about facts or documents or anything else. Sounds like O’Neill should have been blindly loyal to Mr. Bush but that’s difficult for a man of O’Neill’s legendary character and blunt honesty.
O’Neill has given a long interview to the most watched news program in America, “Sixty Minutes,” and Time magazine is publishing a story.
This whole uproar would be a media minute if the topic wasn’t so sad and tragic for the nation. In O’Neill’s book, “The Price of Loyalty,” he charges President Bush with being focused on getting rid of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq more than seven months before 9/11.
And about those weapons of mass destruction, O’Neill said that during the 23 months he was the top man at Treasury, he “never saw anything that would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction.”
More and more evidence piles up daily, in small amounts, that reveal what is now plainly obvious: we built a new foreign policy on what’s called preventive war on weak intelligence that the president and his hawks wove, almost from whole cloth, into a reason for the war on Iraq.
O’Neill said it best: “To me, there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence.”
Wounded and in unspeakable pain, America welcomed war. TV stations repainted their sets and festooned them with flags and we knew it was a way to get those who brutalized innocents in the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
But history passes and gets cold and passion ebbs. There are other truth tellers inside the administration and when they grow older, they will come forth, just to make sure their insights are added to the new histories of this administration.
Even so, because of this war, we are on a hinge of history. These are untested waters and if the national policy remains predicated on what will win elections, we are at even deeper risk.
Rove is circling the wagons. The spin is in. And the only winner when we look at this period 50 years from now may be Bush.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)