The best-laid plans of mice and Republicans...

Tom Engelhardt suggests in An American tipping point? WorkingforChange.com 11/23/05 that the Iraq War wound up blowing up two of the most dearly-held goals of the Bush administration: to assert unchecked Presidential power and to maintain a crony-capitalist system of corruption based on the efforts of fine Republican leaders like Tom DeLay.

He writes:

To put the present crisis in some perspective, you could say that two central agendas of the Bush administration proved to be in conflict, although for years this was less than evident (even to the players involved). There was the long-planned neoconservative drive to invade Iraq and, through that act, begin to remake the Middle East. The neocons were backed in this by Vice President Cheney and his crew in the vice-presidential office as well as allied figures like John Bolton, Stephen Hadley, and (some of the time) Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom were necessarily neocons. The motives this disparate group held for remaking the region in their image ranged from the urge to establish a planetary, militarily enforced Pax Americana and/or an urge to control the oil heartlands of the planet to a desire - from the Likudniks in the administration - to secure the region for an ascendant Sharonista Israel.

Whatever the overlapping motivations, at the heart of this policy lay an urge to unleash a Constitutionally unfettered "war president" on the world. (Torture was a crucial issue in all of this largely because, once established as an essential tool of the war on terror, it would be proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that George Bush's presidency had been freed of all restraints.) Put into full effect on March 20, 2003, when the "war on terror" melded into an invasion of Iraq, the policy was meant to place in the President's hands every global lever of power that mattered for all time.

Of course, the Bush-Cheney-DeLay system had to come unglued sooner or later. Engelhardt is pointing out that it was the disaster known as the Iraq War that blew it open for all to see. When and how it will be stopped is another question.

He describes the crony-capitalist-corruption piece of the grand design this way:

It now seems far clearer that the endless fallout from the fatal decision to invade Iraq is eating away at another agenda entirely, one that emerged from the domestic political wing of this administration - from Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Tom DeLay and their ilk. This was the Republican desire to nail down the country as a purely red (as in red-meat) Republican land. The vetting of the K-Street lobbying crowd, the increasing control over the flow of corporate dollars into politics, the gerrymandering of congressional districts to create an election-proof House of Representatives, the mobilization of a religious base dedicated to an endless set of culture wars, the ushering in of a right-wing Supreme Court, and so many other activities were all meant to create an impregnable Republican Party in control of every lever of power in our country into an endless future.

The unfettered, imperial President and the unfettered, imperial Republican Party were joined at the hip by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led to both the "war on terror" abroad and the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Department domestically. Had the Bush administration pursued both agendas, minus an invasion of Iraq, the two might have remained joined far longer.

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