Captain Future's Log

This is a dangerous moment.

The Bush adminstration is anticipating indictments of White House officials who work directly for the vice-president and the president in the coming week. There is the fear that the vice-president if not the president could be named. There is such a firestorm of anticipation in federal Washington and the media center of New York that even if there are no major indictments, the Bush administration is perceived as so vulnerable on this and nearly every other major issue, that attacks are more open and more savage.

The White House and G.W. Bush are cornered. That makes them potentially very dangerous. They might do something very destructive, in a conscious or unconscious effort to change the subject and rid themselves of this kind of attention.

The purpose of suggesting this possibility is to bring it into the open, so if anything weird does happen, people will realize why it's happening, and it won't necessarily work.

Look at what's happening now. A Sunday New York Times story suggests that "the investigation into the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity is also just one skirmish in the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq."

That fight has preoccupied the White House for more than three years, repeatedly threatening President Bush's credibility and political standing, and has again put the spotlight on Vice President Dick Cheney, who assumed a critical role in assembling and analyzing the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs."

All this of course has been talked about for months if not years, here (and in earlier blogs) and elsewhere. But now it is not just blogs or antiwar sites, or liberal magazines, or Democrats, or even the New York Times. The Times story highlights two significant Republican critiques, both of them blistering, one of them from within the Bush administration, and the other from a highly placed foreign policy official in the administration of the first President Bush.

Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, gave a speech ferociously criticizing the march to war and the conduct of the war. He has been critical before, but these recent events have given his words greater attention. According to the Times, he "complained of a "cabal" between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and other national security issues and of a "real dysfunctionality" in the administration's foreign policy team."

Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the elder Bush, has authored an article forthcoming in the New Yorker which reportedly excoriates the neoconservatives behind the Iraq war and its conduct. The piece is rumored to even quote criticism from G.W. Bush's father.

These valid critiques were valid several years ago as well, but they appear now because there is blood in the water, the administration is weak so there is less political risk in speaking out, and finally because people who weren't ready to hear it before are listening now.

While both attacks could be seen as part of a Rovian effort to shift the blame to Cheney and away from Bush, the president is so wedded to the Iraq war, and his rhetoric so extreme recently in defending it, that there is little real separation now between their views.

If there are indictments, this could lead to an even greater scandal than Watergate. Even if the whole matter doesn't go that far--all the way to the lies that led to war--- this is still a dangerous period because it seems as if it might. We should recall the tales of President Nixon as the Watergate investigations closed in. The pressure got to him, and he became even more aggressive. Insiders apparently knew he was a heavy drinker, and allegedly while drunk, he had suggested the use of nuclear weapons.

Nixon was surrounded by dodgy characters, but there were some cooler heads among top officials who restrained him. At various times, historians assert, his secretaries of state and defense added safeguards to prevent military action being initiated on Nixon's word alone.

But are there any such people in this administration? True believers may not be so sober in their assessments, and political cronies may not have the guts to say no.

Patrick Lang, Former Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, suggests that Bush's quick call for the UN to take steps against Syria for its alleged part in the assaassination of Lebanon's PM is puzzling, because options for the UN and the US are few. Add to that the uncertainty about the extent of Syrian government involvement.

It isn't an act totally inconsistent with the neocon approach, but given the other pressing problems requiring UN and American resources, it is alarming.

It's widely acknowledged that this administration has used elevating the terrorist threat level, or exposing an alleged terrorist plot, for political benefit--to emphasize a point or to change the subject. We must all be on the alert for anything like this, or even worse, in the coming weeks.

We must also hope that there are sober-minded officials in this government who are truly patriotic, and not afraid to refuse to begin a tragedy beyond the ones this administration has already set in motion.

UPDATE: A version of this log entry is on the recommended list at Daily Kos, with lots of comments. Check out also susanhu's diary on Syria.