Cheney Surprises

Now that I've gotten into the 9/11 and post sections of Hayes' Cheney biography there are a number of rocking surprises,

Wolfowitz' Reticence
Paul Wolfowitz, in discussing military options for Iraq was a bit ahead of the game after 9/11 and Cheney told him to keep his shirt on. But Wolfowitz' most ambitious plan was to essentially put US in the role that the UK ultimately filled, which was to take control of southern Iraq and stay out of the capitol. The would have the effect of cutting Hussein off from his ports and changing the nature of the sanctions to those we could monitor as being effective on the regime and not hurting the people. It could still be said that this was interventionist and pre-emptive, but it was on a much smaller scale and may have been an adequate compromise.

Andrew Lundquist's ETF
The flack raised over the substance of Cheney's energy policy was entirely political demagoguery. David Addington, the head of Cheney's staff and chief counsel warned Cheney early on that he should pay attention to the guidlines of FACA. This was the rule that applied to disclosure of task force work in the executive branch. The warning was that FACA was the rule that tripped up Hillary Clinton's health care task force during their time in the White House. Essentially, if you have any non-governmental members of the task force, they are subject to disclosure. There are two important points. One, Cheney didn't run the task force, and two the task force did not run afoul of the FACA ordinance.

Cheney was already aware of the Halliburton jokes and so decided to hire on Andrew Lundquist to be the executive director of the task force. Lundquist took some time to decide but finally left the private sector and signed on. Cheney was in a bit of a pinch to get started because he needed someone already in the energy business to explain exactly the kind of thing that prompted the need for the task force - the energy crisis in California which involved the foolishness of some deregulation and California having to buy electricity on the spot market. (a bit about that)

Folks in the power business understand that electricity demand is generally something we are able to plan for years in advance, and it hasn't generally been a problem handling that. (I built some systems for 3 different energy companies over the years. I know they do commodities hedging up to 20 years in advance). What's difficult is managing freaky weather and peak demand. When this happens, utilities bring small plants, called 'peakers' online. The trick is timing. All power generation plants have to go down for periodic maintenance. What you don't want is to get stuck with peak demand when your peakers are down. When that happens you have to buy power from out of state or out of the region. Hopefully you've had an agreement that allows you to do so, but if you don't and have to buy energy on the spot market, then you lose a huge amount of money - because electricty prices are regulated. You can't sell peak power at too much of a premium over regular power. This gap is essentially what broke PG&E and Edison seven years ago in California.

Several utilities in California had no contracts in place to reserve energy at a low price from outside providers. The DWP in Los Angeles did, and they got through that period with no changes in rates or interruptions in service. Cheney wanted somebody besides himself to do that explaining and run the task force. Lundquist was the man.

The energy policy task force was a 'checkbox' committee. Which is to say, the Bush Administration had already formulated their energy policy and already had their priorities in hand - nothing particularly surprising at all, your standard "expand energy resources, reduce dependence on foreign oil, energy independence stuff". The job of the committee was to run all of that by various interest groups and have them essentially rubber stamp or modify slightly what the Administration had already decided, which was another reason Cheney punted to Lundquist. Naturally, the renewables people were disappointed at their marginal standing and began pitching their bitch. At some point the noise overcame the signal and various individuals ratcheted up the controversy. Specifically, the NRDC sued.

Cheney was simply stubborn and had Addington make the point, and fight on that point, that the energy task force was compliant with the FACA rule on disclosure and there was no legal right nor precedent for full disclosure. Lundquist himself didn't care one way or another, he'd just as soon turn over the papers. Cheney had nothing to hide, but he also had something to prove which is that you simply can't boss the executive around when they are already in compliance.

In the end, the decision to force Cheney to turn over all their papers was vacated.

The current candidate positions are here.

Clinton's Law
Bill Clinton signed into law a little-remarked upon bill which oriented his administration towards regime change. It was known as the Iraq Liberation Act. For a long time in the lead up to the war and justification for it, I was unaware of the existence of this law and its policy implications, which are specifically for regime change.

Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 - Declares that it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.

It doesn't get any clearer than that. All the time I wasted talking about No Fly Zones, I could have gone directly here. Wow. Furthermore, it was revealed in the book, and this is something I pay some attention to a little bit better, that the CIA was a shy party to an attempted coup. Some Iraqi whose name I cannot recall, basically told the US that he was, in light of our stance, going to try to take Saddam out himself. It was a disaster and he lost his life. So how exactly did people expect regime change to take place? My point is that regime change was not a strictly PNACian idea. The more I repeat the phrase, the more I recall Colin Powell saying it, but in fact it was American foreign policy three years before 9/11.

Nigerian Uranium
Yes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger. So the whole thing about the 16 words, in the end, were justified. I still haven't been able to wrap my head around everything relating to  Wilson & Plame and I'm not through that section of the book yet, but the bottom line was the Bush didn't deserve getting bashed on that point.

Powell's UN Presentation
The biggest surprise of all is that the decision to make WMD the focus of the presentation to the UN was Colin Powell's. Cheney and Wolfowitz' idea was to have two whole days of testimony which included the more substantial documentation on how Saddam was supporting terrorism. Their take as that the best case for war against Iraq was the full case, which would take a substantial amount of time to present. Their tack would be to make it clear that even despite some possibly dodgy intelligence on Iraq, the full context of Saddam's threat to the world had not really been made to the UN Security Council, and they needed to be fully embarrassed into action considering their relative passivity in the past. So they made three six inch binders of the full briefing which included extensive documentation of the role of AQ in Iraq, and the extent to which Saddam was funding suicide bombers in Palestine, using WMD on his own people, and selling technology and arms to AQ and other Saudi terrorist groups. Powell took one look at that pile and threw it out.

Of course the great irony in all this was that the anti-war crowd and the containment crowd would have had their most oft-used rationale more satisfied had Powell not gone for the quick slam dunk. Surely those determined opponents of the Bush Administration would have come up with something else, but I think those who were most pressing for continued sanctions would have had a much more difficult go had the long form prevailed.

-

So. We have been adjusted.