Is this what we can expect if there are four more years of Bush?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/03/03_524.html

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There are a few obvious things to say about the last three-plus years and what we might expect from round two. As a start, in its foreign and domestic policies, the Bush administration has shown a consistency of approach that, until the election loomed and the President's poll figures began to drop, might have been termed (to steal a word from a friend) implacable. As we now know from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, among others, the leading figures in this administration arrived in office as radical nationalists in an imagined world of one -- intent on whacking Saddam's Iraq; largely uninterested in terrorism; hooked on a form of "privatization" that redirected money from the public coffers to the pockets of its corporate friends; convinced of an old Chinese revolutionary slogan, that power comes from the barrel of a gun; ready to put the military in command and scale even the heavens themselves with new forms of globe-girdling weaponry; and armed with a mobilizing imperial vision of how the world works, of where its arteries are and how exactly to control the flow of blood, or more accurately, energy. A number of them like the President and vice-president had spent significant parts of their lives connected to energy industries and, from Enron to Halliburton, had fed off that industry's money. Uniquely, the President was able to name as his national security advisor a woman who, while she was on Chevron's board of directors, had had an oil tanker named after her.

Right now, of course, they are intent -- except when it comes to whacking Senator Kerry -- on lessening the implacability factor, one small step at a time. As the President has backed off on testifying before the 9/11 commission (No… Well, just for an hour and only for an audience of two… Well, okay, just "one hour," but no one will be watching the clock…), so in this political season they've been trying to back off from all sorts of things. Oh, you don't like our nominee Anthony Raimondo as "jobs czar" because he axed American workers and moved part of his business to China? No problem. He's gone. You want the UN in Iraq? We're trying. You want allies, well, let me welcome the (despicable) German chancellor to the White House.

I think we can expect that, between now and November, the "reasonable, moderate" George will at long last come out of hibernation; you remember, the famed uniter, not the divider. He'll be strong but considerate, security-conscious but tolerant, open to some version of talk about multilateralism abroad and negotiations at home. Colin Powell will perhaps move closer to front and center and Don Rumsfeld of the Pentagon take a seat nearer the back of the room. Richard Perle has already resigned from the Defense Policy Board. ("We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated. I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign.") Dick Cheney will again act vice presidential. And so on. All will be righter with the world -- assuming, of course, that, from Ayatollah Sistani to the Plame investigation, the world doesn't insist on getting in the way, as it most certainly will -- and all of this, I have no doubt, will be chucked out the window on November 3.

But bits of the administration's past -- and so of its possible future -- are still sticking out everywhere. Just this week, thanks to the five British prisoners released from Guantanamo, we got a shocking peek into that concentration camp, and so a sense of what it means to be inside the Bush version of a total institution, a prison dissociated from any legal system whatsoever -- or, as Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Pentagon spokeswoman, put it most decorously in dismissing as completely false the assertions of one prisoner that he had been tortured and brutalized, "All detainees are treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in accordance with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949."

To the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. Is there any politer way of saying that nothing, not even the Third Geneva Convention, binds the Bush administration and the Pentagon administrators of Guantanamo to the legal frameworks of our world or any other world? It's these little things -- set, in this case, against the hair-raising account of one prisoner, even if just half true -- that remind us of what was at the heart of Bush's first term.

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