When America was intelligent in foreign policy

[Meest]

To answer the OP, things went downhill in/around the war of 1812, when the original Federal party faded away and the war mongering businessmen got their way. Originally the states didn't want anything to do with world politics.

[SirNitram]

It went downhill when America divided foreign policy into a ridiculous black/white situation of 'Overconfidently march in like we own the place' which leads to fuckups like Iraq and 'We should never ever get involved with the outside world' which results in sitting with their thumbs up their butts during the World Wars.

[Tsyroc]

It went downhill when America divided foreign policy into a ridiculous black/white situation of 'Overconfidently march in like we own the place' which leads to fuckups like Iraq and 'We should never ever get involved with the outside world' which results in sitting with their thumbs up their butts during the World Wars.

Except that we should have stayed out of WWI and gotten officially involved in WWII sooner.

As for being overconfident. I feel that it first really started after the "fall" of communism. That made the hard core money grubbing capitalists over confident in essentially a black or white type of mind set (communism/socialism bad therefore unrestricted rampant capitalism = the end all be all). The US didn't really get completely overconfident though until Gulf War I appeared to go so easilly.

After our equipment and tactics worked so well against an opponent with a large army and a defense system set-up somewhat like the old USSR I started hearing lots of people saying how they knew it all along and that the USSR itself had been overrated. Supposedly the Russians and Chinese were both shocked and surprised at how well the US forces worked. There was even something attributed to Tom Clancy in that he supposedly knew that the US would do better against the USSR than what he put in Red Storm Rising but he changed it to be more in line with what military experts at the time were saying because no one would have accepted his book otherwise.

I think the Gulf War had the unfortunate side effect of causing some people to mostly unlearn, write off, or just plain forget what happened in Vietnam.

The Gulf War also served as kind of a wake-up period for the US in a post USSR world. We'd coasted a little with the break-up of the USSR and then Bush started programs to reduce and streamline the military and then of course the build up to GWI began. A lot of people seem to forget that a lot of people were very frightened that GW would turn into a very large blood bath for both sides because of the size of Iraq's army. The fact that the US built up it's forces for ~ six months and got help from a large coalition shows that we weren't over confident then. I would even add that not going into and occupying Baghdad during GWI also shows that, on some level, we didn't think or didn't want to deal with the mess that would entail.

I realize that not going in but maintaining our presence in the area contributed to some of the problems that we currently have in the region but I think the current situation in Iraq is proving that G. H. W. Bush was correct in not listening to the people who his son is currently taking advice from.

[Vympel]

This article is highly appropriate for this thread:

Mission accomplished
Bush's brain trust had a grand plan for the Middle East. The results are coming home every day in body bags.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Martin Sieff

April 8, 2004 | Vice President Dick Cheney; Secretary of State Colin Powell; National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. What kind of people are they, these viceroys of American foreign policy who serve at the behest of the Emperor George III, second ruler of the Bush Dynasty? James Mann tries to answer that question in his ambitious new book "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet." Yet for all its obvious high-minded seriousness -- indeed, largely because of it -- this is a frustrating though valuable read.

At its best, Mann's book is essential reading for background on the Bush team, how they came together, how they think and what they think -- when they think at all. Mann, now senior writer-in-residence at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, built an enviable and deserved reputation as one of the most respected, thorough and reliable reporters in Washington, especially on East Asian affairs, during his years with the Los Angeles Times, and this book reflects these virtues. It is solidly researched and highly readable; it is also filled with important and valuable judgments.

It is important to note, as Mann does, that Bush's "Vulcans," named after the Roman god of heavy industry and weapons of war, are all still Cold Warriors in the recesses of their souls. The bulk of Mann's book deliberately does not deal with the changed world of 9/11 and what resulted from it. Some 80 percent of his text is devoted to the rise and shaping of his protagonists in the 35 years that preceded recent dire events.

Mann is duly respectful of his subjects. But like Bob Woodward in "Bush at War," his low-key style may obscure to the casual reader crucial points and devastating trends that he documents. For all their long résumés in appointed positions, none of his subjects, to use Sam Rayburn's famous phrase about President Johnson's Vietnam hawks, could ever win a contested election for dogcatcher.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, Mann notes, both hoped to run for president -- the first in the '80s and the second in the '90s -- but for all the "wealth of experience in Washington" that both could boast, at least on their résumés, "they did not attract the money, the name recognition or the core base of supporters that provide the ingredients of success in presidential politics." Both men had successfully run for election and reelection to Congress, but in safe seats that for conservative Republicans required as much charisma and electoral skill as winning election as a Communist Party candidate in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

There is of course a cleavage in the inner circle of these Vulcans. It is the dividing line between traditional cautious internationalism as advocated by Powell and his deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and the sweeping, triumphal, Tom Clancyesque fantasies of power advocated -- and, under Bush II, practiced -- by the rest of the group.[/b[ That cleavage follows another defining fault line. Powell and Armitage, so often decried contemptuously as wimps by the armchair warriors of the neocon Op-Ed columns, are brave men who served in combat in Vietnam. None of the rest ever saw action. Rumsfeld was a Navy pilot in the '50s, but never had to experience the dangers and messiness of war. Mann notes the contrast in defining life and experience between Armitage and Wolfowitz. "Wolfowitz's training ground," he writes, "was in the world of academia, while Armitage's was in the mud of Vietnam."

It is also revealing about the truly archaic and romanticized worldview of the hawks among this "Superior Six" that they have an obsessive reverence for Winston Churchill to the point of childishness. "In times of adversity many of the Vulcans instinctively sought inspiration from Winston Churchill," Mann writes. He further rightly points out the irony that "among the Vulcans" Churchill's contemporaneous war leader, America's own President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "did not enjoy the same iconic status."

Indeed, Mann documents how Churchill's words and example evoke the same infantile worship and slavish identification as sightings of Elvis among the True Believers. Right after the al-Qaida terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Mann relates, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's fawning neocon chief of staff, applied to his boss Churchill's famous lines on assuming the premiership of Britain in 1940: "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."

However, it is unfortunately all too typical of this book that far from questioning the maturity, or even sanity of such flights of fancy, Mann takes them at face value. "The underlying meaning made sense," he solemnly writes.

If a ghostly, ironic presence hovers over every page of "Rise of the Vulcans," it is the memory of "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam's famous skewering of a former foreign policy establishment -- that of the administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who gave us Vietnam. For what Mann has produced is a "Best and the Brightest"-lite; a description of a foreign policy elite even more pleased with itself and the narcissistic reflection of its own imagined brilliance than the tragic team led by Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Yet this "Best and Brightest II," unlike Halberstam's exercise in focused, controlled fury and disdain, is written without anger and irony. Mann takes his subjects at their own face value and estimation.

Where Halberstam focused on the fierce internal debates and rivalries between his subjects, Mann plays them down, going out of his way to present Powell as a hawk not so different from Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Mann acknowledges "the many bitter disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department." But one does not get a sense from this book of the sheer ferocity with which Powell and Armitage were repeatedly attacked, undercut and humiliated during the Bush II administration or the degree to which their colleagues in government coordinated so closely with their media allies outside it to ridicule and disparage those who tried to stand up to them.

But Mann has been doubly fortunate in the timing of publication. His volume was still fresh in the bookstores when Richard A. Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, made his explosive allegations two weeks ago before the 9/11 commission, ultimately forcing Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath before the commission. This serendipitous timing could only boost the book's sales.

Mann was even more fortunate that the book was already out when Clarke electrified the nation with his charges of the administration's gross complacency and incompetence about the al-Qaida terrorist threat in the eight months before the terrible attacks of 9/11. Otherwise, he would have had to add at least a chapter, if not heavily revise the entire book. As it is, Mann's book is suddenly heavily dated, even while still fresh on the newsstands. Clarke, for example, does not rate a single mention in the index.

The book's biggest failing is in its reverential treatment of Paul Wolfowitz. Mann documents his calling for the toppling of Saddam Hussein as early as 1993 in a National Review article, and notes that his "greatest passion" was always devoted to Iraq. Yet it is remarkable that in such a generally exhaustive and excellently researched work, Mann does not devote any space to Wolfowitz's deservedly notorious 1992 memorandum while undersecretary of defense for policy to the first President Bush, arguing that maintaining the territorial integrity of Lithuania should be a priority foreign policy goal for the United States of such importance that it should be worth waging a full scale conventional war with Russia to maintain it. So enthusiastically did Wolfowitz warm to this theme in the memo, which was subsequently leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, that he even enumerated in some detail the military forces which would be needed to wage it: the number of fighter squadrons, aircraft carrier battle groups operating in the Baltic Sea, and NATO combat divisions.

Wolfowitz has since tried to dismiss the memorandum as a contingency study of the kind any responsible military planners would make. But it deserves closer examination. Proposals that Wolfowitz penned at the same time about U.S. global dominance and the need to take out Saddam have since been translated into reckless reality. One should not rule out his capability to make other mad dreams real as well, regardless of the cost that others will have to pay in blood for them.

Wolfowitz on Iraq as described by Mann is Wolfowitz as he wishes to be seen -- and perhaps even sees himself. Here is a dignified, cautious, responsible intellectual heavyweight, a moderate centrist who comes late in the day and reluctantly, but only after soberly weighing all things in the balance, to the profound conclusion that Iraq must be conquered for the Good of the Republic and to end its very real threat of weapons of mass destruction. It has about as much connection to reality as describing Saddam Hussein as a social democrat.

There is no hint here of the Wolfowitz of reality as documented already two years ago by Bob Woodward in "Bush at War," the Wolfowitz who within 48 hours of 9/11, while the hellish flames were still burning at ground zero and the death clouds had not yet dissipated over Manhattan, was already urging the president to focus on invading Iraq rather than hunting down al-Qaida for no better reason than it would be easier to do. There is no hint in Mann of the relentless disparaging of U.S. intelligence, the State Department, and the CIA, and even those honorable analysts within the Pentagon power structure who dared to defy the determination of the deputy defense secretary and his cohorts that responsibility for the atrocity be hung on Iraq even when there was never a scintilla of serious evidence to support it.

Nor does Mann document the embarrassing fact that this supposedly wise and dignified figure and those he convinced were wildly, irresponsibly, ludicrously, incompetent and catastrophically wrong in every intelligence estimate they made on Iraq -- even though two of the Vulcans, Powell and Armitage, had authorized before the war a massive 17-volume State Department assessment titled "The Future of Iraq" that proved right in every major particular, but which was contemptuously ignored then and thereafter by the Pentagon hawks and White House. Hundreds of Americans have already paid with their lives for that combination of arrogance and incompetence, and the death toll is growing and even metastasizing.

Mann is not unique in falling for Wolfowitz's well-documented soft-spoken charm, when he wants to use it. Wolfowitz's playing of experienced and influential senior journalists in Washington and New York, and his success in getting them to take him at his own highly inflated estimation, is the most successful and striking since the heyday of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger or James A. Baker. But Kissinger, like his contemporary and rival Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter's national security advisor), was an intellectual figure of genuine and great distinction before he ever appeared in Washington, while Baker was an immensely experienced and genuinely cautious and responsible power-player in positions of authority in the White House and as secretary of the treasury before he became secretary of state. Wolfowitz, in striking contrast to the seductive persona depicted by supposedly skeptical journalists, had a well-documented track record of being a reckless gambler and plunger, who spoke and argued in the most sweeping and dangerous terms. The New York Times' Bill Keller noted, in his generally very sympathetic and largely uncritical study of Wolfowitz in the Sept. 22, 2002, Sunday New York Times Magazine, that the deputy defense secretary was convinced from the word "go" that Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks, and that Wolfowitz "wrote a sympathetic blurb" for Laurie Mylroie's book blaming the World Trade Center attack in 1993 on Iraq and connecting the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing with Iraq -- all wild allegations without evidence.

Wolfowitz's success in blinding even serious and experienced reporters provides an example of the lifelong distrust my old friend the late I.F. Stone expressed for "access journalism" -- the top Washington journalistic goal of gaining sympathetic access to one's highest-level sources that so often results in unwittingly becoming their amplifiers or puppets.

Wolfowitz's friend and benefactor, national security advisor Rice, has been another beneficiary of this familiar relationship. Like Wolfowitz, her academic track record in books and serious research is actually negligible. Like Wolfowitz, she is rather an experienced courtier skilled in the ways of deference and flattery to those in power and who share similar moralistic and simplistic views of the world. Like him, she knows how to work the media and appear dignified and "thoughtful" in public -- as long as she is not pressed with hostile questioning too hard. And, as Mann documents very clearly, she like he was shaped by late Cold War certainties, and brought those views unmodified by experience or changing circumstance to a completely different era that both could speak glibly about but that neither began to understand. 9/11, as Mann vividly shows, came as a bolt from the blue to both of them and their friends.

Mann, therefore, for all his solid and very valuable reporting, has written an incomplete book -- and the problem is not what he put in but what he left out. Ahmed Chalabi, the corrupt Iraqi National Congress leader who led the Vulcan hawks by the nose and is now their chosen candidate to run Iraq with an iron hand, bamboozled them with one wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claim about Iraq after another, yet he rates only a single mention in the index; and Clarke, as noted above, none at all.

Mann also sincerely but incorrectly greatly underestimates the vast influence Richard Perle has wielded in the policymaking circles of the Bush administration. But Perle is only described as a former official and one of the outside-the-government leaders in the argument to prosecute the war in Iraq. There is no sense reading Mann of the hothouse environment of the neoconservative movement, or the disciplined and extraordinarily coordinated way in which they place their Op-Ed pieces, give the appropriate leaks and quotes to compliant and eager journalists who would swallow them whole, mutually boost the myths of each other's brilliance, and disparage their political and intellectual opponents with a sustained level of invective unseen in American public discourse since the worst of the Joe McCarthy red-baiting years. Yet anyone who has opened a newspaper or read a neoconservative magazine at least once since 9/11 knows this to be a truism.

Mann spoke to his subjects too much. He took them too much at their own estimation. Discussing those responsible for the great security failure of 9/11, he displays no anger and apportions no blame. Faced with the reality of an unnecessary war in Iraq entered into on the grounds of intelligence that was distorted, hyped and false -- and known to be so at the time, as far more solid, cautious and sober assessments that were widely available at the time warned -- Mann is quiet.

Whatever caveats one may have with some of Mann's interpretations, of the abundant and valuable material he has assembled, his final conclusion appears irrefutable. "There was no question," he writes, "that the Vulcans' venture into Iraq grew out of their previous thirty five years of thinking about America's role in the world ... It was the story of the pursuit of unrivaled American power."

But there is a bit more to it than that. Under a weak, insecure and inexperienced president, Bush's hawks finally got the chance to put their sweeping and simplistic theories into practice. They were taken totally by surprise by 9/11 and then used it as the pretext to implement their long cherished enterprise of conquering Iraq. Beyond that, they had thought through and anticipated nothing. And what are the results? Just click on the evening news tonight to see the scenes in Iraq right now. The consequences of these Vulcans' certainties are coming home in body bags from halfway round the world, day by day. And they will continue to do so.

[Rogue 9]

Except that we should have stayed out of WWI and gotten officially involved in WWII sooner.

Yay, hand victory to the Germans. France was on the cusp of surrenderi n 1917. (Amazed it didn't happen sooner; they are, after all, French.)

[Crown]

Except that we should have stayed out of WWI and gotten officially involved in WWII sooner.

Yay, hand victory to the Germans. France was on the cusp of surrenderi n 1917. (Amazed it didn't happen sooner; they are, after all, French.)

What the fuck are you talking about? The German offensive was crushed and broken before America got involved. The new allied tactics (pioneered by Aust. Gen Monash) were whitteling the Germans down.

America just sped the process up with fresh bodies for the meat grinder, but the writting was on the wall when Germany tried and failed 3 times to take Paris, and the Allied counter-offensive had effectively broken the German's back.

[Vympel]

Yay, hand victory to the Germans. France was on the cusp of surrenderi n 1917. (Amazed it didn't happen sooner; they are, after all, French.)

Not this lame, tiresome French surrender crap again. Anyway, I suggest you study WW1 in more detail. The Germans didn't have a prayer of victory.

[Crown]

Yay, hand victory to the Germans. France was on the cusp of surrenderi n 1917. (Amazed it didn't happen sooner; they are, after all, French.)

Not this lame, tiresome French surrender crap again. Anyway, I suggest you study WW1 in more detail. The Germans didn't have a prayer of victory.

Infact, IIRC, the Germans were in Washington fishing for an armistice prior to US soldiers entering the front lines (although I think that they were in France at the time).

[theski]

Meest wrote

Yet when the exact same can be said of Cheney/Bush and their cronies making billions at the same time? Conflicting isn't it. Hold the same standards you place on the UN as the US then talk about conflict of interest.

Sorry in advance for the mini thread hijack here... This is such utter bullshit..... Please show me where Cheney or Bush has made a dime off the war..... Please a finacial statement showing income from any part of the Iraq war.. * Rant off*

[Tsyroc]

Except that we should have stayed out of WWI and gotten officially involved in WWII sooner.

Yay, hand victory to the Germans. France was on the cusp of surrenderi n 1917. (Amazed it didn't happen sooner; they are, after all, French.)

So what if they were on the verge of surrender? I think it would have been much better for all involved if they would have beaten each other to a bloody pulp and then finally decided to swallow their egos and give up on wasting their people and their resources on proving who wasn't going to back down this time.

There was still very little reason for the USA to get directly involved in such a stupid and pointless war, but then I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone who would have been sent into the meat grinder of trench warfare.

If you can say that that there was something in that war important enough for you or one of your family members to be the first one over the top on another pointless charge through "No Man's Land" then maybe it was worth the US being involved.

While I tend to think we helped the war end more quickly but I also wonder if by doing so we may have enabled the settlement terms that Germany got saddled with which helped set up the next World War.

[Colonel Olrik]

Thread split.

[Meest]

Sorry in advance for the mini thread hijack here... This is such utter bullshit..... Please show me where Cheney or Bush has made a dime off the war..... Please a finacial statement showing income from any part of the Iraq war.. * Rant off*

Few examples

"Dick Cheney's ties to conglomerate Halliburton are the tip of the iceberg since at least thirty-two top officials in the Bush administration served as executives or paid consultants to top weapons contractors before joining the administration."

"The Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) unit of Halliburton (HAL: up $0.54 to $20.66, Research, Estimates), of which Cheney was CEO from 1995 to 2000, said late Monday that it was awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires and make emergency repairs to Iraq's oil infrastructure.

President Bush Tuesday asked Congress for $489.3 million to cover the cost of repairing damage to Iraq's oil facilities, much or all of which could go to Halliburton or its subcontractors under the terms of its contract with the Army."

Coincidence right? That's just from googling, there's so much more. This only really covers some of Halliburton, Carlyle group just adds to the list of friends/family/former execs now in government making bunches off the war. It's pretty obvious what's going on except to blind Bush-wankers.

[theski]

Meest wrote

Coincidence right? That's just from googling, there's so much more. This only really covers some of Halliburton, Carlyle group just adds to the list of friends/family/former execs now in government making bunches off the war. It's pretty obvious what's going on except to blind Bush-wankers.

AGAIN.. show me where, as you put it BUSH/CHENEY PERSONALLY PROFITED FROM THE WAR

SO I ask are all of the Friends and family of every High level government employee suposed to dump all of their stock in every company that sometime may do work for the Pentagon????? More Liberal wanking... Welcome to the real world of Stocks and 401k.... Everyone one has stocks in something,,

[Keevan_Colton]

Meest wrote

Coincidence right? That's just from googling, there's so much more. This only really covers some of Halliburton, Carlyle group just adds to the list of friends/family/former execs now in government making bunches off the war. It's pretty obvious what's going on except to blind Bush-wankers.

AGAIN.. show me where, as you put it BUSH/CHENEY PERSONALLY PROFITED FROM THE WAR

SO I ask are all of the Friends and family of every High level government employee suposed to dump all of their stock in every company that sometime may do work for the Pentagon????? More Liberal wanking... Welcome to the real world of Stocks and 401k.... Everyone one has stocks in something,,

Sheps bullshit reffered to Kofi's family, so family are certainly valid.

[theski]

Keevan_Colton wrote

heps bullshit reffered to Kofi's family, so family are certainly valid.

I see your point... but there is a huge difference between Owning Stock in a Company and TAKING BRIBES FROM IRAQ

IMHO my point is still open..

[PainRack]

Keevan_Colton wrote

heps bullshit reffered to Kofi's family, so family are certainly valid.

I see your point... but there is a huge difference between Owning Stock in a Company and TAKING BRIBES FROM IRAQ

IMHO my point is still open..

What's the difference? Kofi didn't directly profit from Saddam giving him huge loads of cash. He just benefited from UN programmes that somehow or another put cash into his pockets. Same here

[theski]

PainRack wrote

What's the difference? Kofi didn't directly profit from Saddam giving him huge loads of cash. He just benefited from UN programmes that somehow or another put cash into his pockets. Same here

WTF..... What did the Money farie slip him some cash under his pillow???

A bribe is different then a stock transaction... They are not even in the same universe

[Vympel]

What's this Kofi Annan taking bribes from Iraq bullshit, and who invented it?

[theski]

I said his family.... but here is the story...

Kojo & Kofi
Unbelievable U.N. stories.

By Claudia Rosett

In the growing scandal over the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, which from 1996-2003 supervised relief to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and his staff have excused themselves from any responsibility for the massive corruption involving billions in bribes and kickbacks that went on via more than $100 billion in U.N.-approved contracts for Saddam to sell oil and buy humanitarian supplies. U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.


That's fascinating, not least given the ties of Annan's own son, Kojo Annan, to the Switzerland-based firm, Cotecna, which from 1999 onward worked on contract for the U.N. monitoring the shipments of Oil-for-food supplies into Iraq. These were the same supplies sent in under terms of those tens of billions of dollars worth of U.N.-approved contracts in which the U.N. says it failed to notice Saddam Hussein's widespread arrangements to overpay contractors who then shipped overpriced goods to the impoverished people of Iraq and kicked back part of their profits to Saddam's regime.

Cotecna was hired by the U.N. on December 31, 1998. Shortly afterward, press reports surfaced that Kojo was a partner in a private consulting firm doing work for Cotecna, and that just 13 months previously he had occupied a senior slot on Cotecna's own staff. Asked about this in 1999 by the London Telegraph, a U.N. spokesman, John Mills, replied that the U.N. had not been aware of the connection, and that "The tender by Cotecna was the lowest by a significant margin."

It seems there's a lot the U.N. managed not to be aware of. But the information that Cotecna — while employing Kofi's son in any capacity — put in the lowest bid by far for the job of authenticating Saddam's Oil-for-Food imports, is not necessarily reassuring. Cotecna, which got paid roughly $6 million for its services during that first year (the U.N. will not release figures on Cotecna's fees over the following years) was bidding on work that empowered its staff to inspect tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks as a routine part of business. The issue was never solely whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy.

The rest is long...

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/r ... 101819.asp

[skeewhiff]

Here you guys go, and excerpt from a highly reguarded paper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international ... 26,00.html

Cheney is still paid by Pentagon contractor

Halliburton, the Texas company which has been awarded the Pentagon's contract to put out potential oil-field fires in Iraq and which is bidding for postwar construction contracts, is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.
The payments, which appear on Mr Cheney's 2001 financial disclosure statement, are in the form of "deferred compensation" of up to $1m (£600,000) a year.

When he left Halliburton in 2000 to become George Bush's running mate, he opted not to receive his leaving payment in a lump sum but instead have it paid to him over five years, possibly for tax reasons.

Now its defered, but read further:

"Also, the vice president has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pentagon bidding process," the aide added.

The contracts in Iraq were no bid.

The article does show that Haliburton and other companies have been servicing the states for decades. Fine. But George Bush Sr. has turned much of the government run operations over to private companies. He and his staff then leave office make a few million bucks off of weapons "defense systems" and come right back into office to award new contracts to these same companies. Pretty sweet deal. And so the revolving door keeps spinning, just not as fast as the fox (spin zone).

There was a request that Cheney sell all his stock, since it did clearly represent a conflict of interest, when he and Bush were sworn in in 2001. He simply refused and the White House moved on. Oh and owning stock in a company that is part of daily government operations is a clear conflict of interest. Especially when you consider that there have been two wars in one term under a White House that has had 9 out of 31 staffers directly or indirectly profit from said wars.

[Meest]

http://www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html

Even if you ignore any pro left views just look at who's involved, George Senior is still on the payroll, yet when Kofi Annan makes money for his son he's evil, when Bush's and family and friends do the same, its just playing the market game right?

[skeewhiff]

Got something for you info warriors.
This is a Dutch Documentary on the Carlyle group.

WARNING, REAL PLAYER REQUIRED:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... le3995.htm

Note: The first one minute forty seven seconds of this program is in broadcast in Dutch, The remainder is in English

If you are opposed to real player, check out real-alt.

[theski]

skeewhiff and Meest both quoted UMMMMMMM a bit biased sites..

I guess I get to start quoteing Newsmax World net Daily

Come on guys... a real source for Bush and Cheney making any money off the war...

ALso again...... It is a BRIBE>..What part of that word don't you understand.... He is not making money... He is getting BRIBED

[HemlockGrey]

Since we're talking about American diplomatic entanglements from the olden days, I am reminded of, during the USS Constitution's world cruise, of the time that it stopped in at a village in Southeast Asia, in present-day Vietnam, on the request of some Europeans who were being held captive. The captain of the ship, whose name escapes me, bombarded the village, captured some mandarins, launched a few sorties and generally attempted to secure the release of the Europeans by force. He sailed away empty-handed.

Gee, now which of these two situations sounds more like the modern day?

[Darth Wong]

The captain of the ship, whose name escapes me ...

Rumsfeld's great great great grandfather?