The Bush unraveling?

Maybe I'm getting carried away by the inherent fascination of the narratives and the mysteries.

But the latest round of espionage stories is starting to look like the death knell for the Bush administration.

Not necessarily Bush's defeat in the fall election.  With the Republicans firmly in control of all three branches of the national government, they may be able to keep the lid on it until after the election.

But what we're seeing come to light more and more is the extent to which Bush's entire foreign policy, or at least the central elements of it, have been run like a rogue intelligence operation.  Iran-Contra as a model for governing.

It's now to the point that investigations of one disaster soon bump up against another.  The story on the possible leak of classified information to the Israeli government involves threads that lead to Iran policy, Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans (OSP) that helped cook up the phony intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, the multi-faceted Ahmed Chalabi fiasco, possibly even to the Valerie Plame exposure.

The common thread is the Bush administration's model of governing by deception and secrecy.  One of the under-appreciated findings by James Mann in his excellent study Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004) is that both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had worked together in senior positions in President Gerald Ford's administration, were deeply involved in the "continuity of government" contingency planning for a major national emergency, and heavily influenced by it in their approach to governing.  As Mann describes it:

[Donald] Rumsfeld and [Dick] Cheney were principal figures in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan administration.  Under it, the administration furtively carried out detailed planning exercises to establish a new American "president" and his staff, outside and beyond the specifications of the U.S. Constitution, in order to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  Over the years a few details about the existence of this Reagan-era effort have come to light, but not the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld. (my emphasis)

Note that there's nothing inherently sinister about this kind of planning. It's necessary.  But it also provides some important insights into Cheney's and Rumsfeld's sense of how secret government can be used.

But "necessary" is one thing.  This operation during the Reagan administration was something else:

The problem that this program was extralegal and extraconstitutional - that it established a process for designating a new American president that is nowhere authorized in the U.S. Constitution or federal law - is not merely a criticism manufactured by a law professor or an opponent of the Reagan administration.  Rather, this problem was inherent in the Reagan-era program and was indeed part of the very rationale for the exercises. (my emphasis)

Mann points out that the Reagan plan envisioned setting aside existing law for the presidential succession under some circumstances.  The secret program was established by an executive order.  The National Security Council appointed Oliver North, later to become famous in the Iran-Contra scandal, as its "action officer" for the program. Some of these efforts were supervised by then Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had acquired a fascination for secret operations as director the CIA (and possibly a CIA "asset" in earlier days).

Mann emphasizes that neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld initiated this particular idea for the secret continuity-of-government exercises.  But he stresses that its also important to realize the effect that it had on their perspectives:

Nevertheless, as team leaders Cheney and Rumsfeld played important roles in this project.

Moreover, their participation in these Reagan-era exercises demonstrated a broader underlying truth about Cheney and Rumsfeld:  Over three decades, from the Ford administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never too far away; they stayed in touch with its defense, military and intelligence officials and were regularly called upon by those officials.  Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the Unted States, inhabitants of world in which presidents may come and go, but America always keeps on fighting.

Mann supports the view of Cheney that Josh Marshall has presented in his reporting on the Bush administration as being deeply involved in key policy decisions.  And Mann suggests that Cheney's entire approach to his role in government was heavily influenced by his experiences in the Reagan-era exercises.  Cheney, of course, became famous for his sojourns as Vice President in "undisclosed locations."

Eventually, the "undisclosed location" turned into a national joke, a routine for the comedy shows.  It became part of Cheney's identity.  The blend of solemnity and mystery was fitting for a man who, throughout his career, had embodied the twin propositions that (a) running government was weighty, unglamorous business and that (b) he always had some secrets he could not discuss. ...

Still, out of public view [in the days after the 9/11/01 attacks], Cheney was omnipresent, even when he was off in an undisclosed location and was participating in the administration's meetings only with his image and voice piped in on Secvid, the secure video teleconferencing system.  It was Cheney's specter that hovered over the admnistration's policy deliberations, its internal wrangling, its decision making[,] ... over virtually every foreign policy action the Bush administration took, whether on terrorism or Afghanistan, the Middle East or Iraq...

What we may well be seeing now is the collapse of the elaborate web of deceptions that this hyper-secretive administration has been spinning, not so much to deceive our enemies as to deceive the American voters.