October/November Surprise?

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/08/08_512.html

 

August 9, 2004

October/November Surprise?

 

By Tom Engelhardt

 

Among Bush administration opponents -- and not just

those on the Internet either -- there's a deep-seated,

Florida-inspired, and not unreasonable fear of an

October or even November 2nd " surprise. " Over the last

year, for instance, there have been spasms of

Diebold-mania (in honor of one of the Republican-donor

firms making the paper-trail-less,

touch-screen-computer voting machines, considered

quite capable of producing a Florida II). Or what

about those " felon lists, " endlessly purged in Baby

Bush's state of perfectly un-felonesque

African-American Floridians but not of (usually

Republican-voting) Hispanics, felonious or otherwise?

Michael Moore is heading for the state on Election

Day, camera in hand, but who isn't?

 

Then there have been those conspiracy-theory rumors

that Osama bin Laden is already an administration

captive held in a spiderhole somewhere in Pakistan

until needed at the end of October? Or is al-Qaeda

perhaps preparing a massive, last moment terrorist

attack in the United States meant to throw the

election to the " other fanatic, " the one most likely

in his second term to continue to produce a terrorist

dreamworld? Or will a last second Red Alert turn the

attention of voters to the Presidential column, or

will that alert even be the excuse for the Bush

administration to postpone the elections?

 

These and other rumors, theories, fears, and

end-of-the-Republic-as-we-know-it scenarios have not

just been flying around the Web, but making their way

into the mainstream media. For instance, Robert

Kuttner of the Boston Globe and the American Prospect

magazine just wrote up three election scenarios to

fear, each chilling in its own way; while in a recent

column (Fear of Fraud), Paul Krugman of the New York

Times, regularly on the mark, took out after the

dangers of touch-screen voting as well as Jeb Bush's

vote-vetting scams. According to the Times' David M.

Halbfinger, John Kerry is taking the possibility of

November 2nd surprises seriously indeed and is already

ramping up his legal teams to duke it out in

battleground states where results seem in any way

suspicious. ( " Aides to Kerry say the campaign is

taking the unprecedented step of setting up a

nationwide legal network under its own umbrella,

rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers

associated with state Democratic parties… 'A million

African-Americans disenfranchised in the last

election,' he said at the NAACP convention in

Philadelphia…, 'Well, we're not just going to sit

there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in

your cities, my campaign will provide teams of

election observers and lawyers to monitor elections,

and we will enforce the law.' " )

 

And while the administration undoubtedly isn't holding

Osama bin Laden for just the right moment, there are

more modest recent examples of its willingness to go

that extra mile down some dark alley in its own

electoral self-interest. Consider, as a start, an

interesting graphic recently posted by Juliusblog (and

spotted by an eagle-eyed Tomdispatch reader). It

combines the clever, ever-sliding Bush approval chart

at Professor Pollkatz's Pool of Polls with the major

administration alerts into a pattern that looks

suspiciously self-serving indeed.

 

Or take the most recent Orange Alert, which came just

after the Democratic Convention as Kerry was setting

out on the campaign trail and was based on a series of

arrests of al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan, the first of

which, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI's twenty-second

" Most Wanted " terrorist, was announced on the day of

Kerry's acceptance speech. To be more precise, it was

announced by Faisal Saleh Hayyat, Pakistan's interior

minister, at that top Pakistani hour for making

crucial announcements -- midnight (but acceptance

speech day halfway across the world.). Actually, to be

yet more accurate, the arrest itself had been made not

that day but four days earlier. What's surprising here

is not the four-day lag, but the speed with which the

announcement was made -- a kind of unseemly tip-off to

any al-Qaeda figures connected to Ghailani. As former

CIA operative Robert Baer commented on the timing of

the announcement: " It makes no sense to make the

announcement then. Presumably, everything [Al Qaeda]

does is compartmented. By announcing to everybody in

the world that we have this guy, and he is talking,

you have to assume that you shoot tactics. To keep

these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be

kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an

arrest like this. "

 

All this was explained recently by John Judis, Spencer

Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari in a New Republic

magazine piece, Has TNR'S Prediction Come True? July

Surprised. They add:

 

" Last month, the New Republic reported that the

Bush administration was pressuring the Pakistanis to

deliver a " high-value target " (HVT) in time for the

November elections (July Surprise?) According to an

official with Pakistan's powerful Inter Services

Intelligence (ISI), a White House aide told ISI chief

Ehsan ul-Haq during a spring visit to Washington that

'it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any]

HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or

twenty-eight July,' during the convention. When asked

this week if the announcement of Ghailani's capture on

July 29 confirmed TNR's reporting, National Security

Council spokesman Sean McCormack told the Los Angeles

Times, 'There is no truth to that statement.' "

 

More striking yet was the announcement that followed.

As part of the ramping up of its Orange Alert, the

administration announced that an al-Qaeda computer

expert and techno-whiz had just been arrested with

terrifying material on his computer, and then, when

the New York Times learned his name, evidently

confirmed it to the paper. The catch was, as Reuters

recently revealed, when Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan was

arrested, he agreed to turn double agent -- and so

became that rarest of all creatures, a potential mole

inside al-Qaeda. Soon thereafter, his cover was blown.

" 'The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or

worse,' said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes

for Jane's Defence publications.'You have to ask: what

are they doing compromising a deep mole within al

Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in

there in the first place?... Running agents within a

terrorist organisation is the Holy Grail of

intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major

setback which negates months and years of work, which

may be difficult to recover. "

 

In this we certainly have a nasty brew of remarkable

incompetence and manipulative acts aimed at helping

George Bush get reelected -- the MO of this

administration for at least the last year or so. Can

there be any question that the Bush men would consider

almost any scenario that might advance their

candidate's second-term fortunes? I think not. But

their incompetence shouldn't be overlooked either; nor

should we focus too exclusively on such scenarios

ourselves. In that focus lies a lurking fatalism which

has its own dangers. It leads to an overestimation of

the Machiavellian abilities of the somewhat inept

Busheviks, treating them as if they were a comic-book

cohort of X-men, superhuman in their ability to grab

fate decisively by the throat, reorganize reality to

suit their needs, and manipulate the American public.

In fact, if you think about it a moment, the Bush

administration has proven far less competent since it

tossed the Iraqi dice than either its top officials or

most of its opponents ever conceived possible. And

there's a surprise for you!

 

Whatever surprises this administration is planning for

the coming months, it's hard to imagine an

administration that's been as regularly caught

off-guard by events as this one. Reality has been

biting back with surprising ferocity. Among their

manipulations that haven't worked out quite as planned

you would have to include the front-loading of the

economy (those tax rebates now long gone) and the

passing of Iraqi " sovereignty " in a two-day early June

" surprise " that managed to shove Iraq onto the inside

pages of the papers and deep into the nightly news for

a month -- but in both cases (see below), reality

shoved back in surprising ways. Not only is there no

guarantee that an administration electoral surprise

will work as planned, but it's a reasonable guess

that, of the surprises that lie ahead, the majority

aren't likely to fall Bush's way. These could be a

long three months for Karl Rove & Co.

 

I'm sure all of you could come up with your own lists

of ways this administration has been and may continue

to be ambushed, but here's a little starter-list of my

own -- ten surprises this administration proved

remarkably unprepared for.

 

1. " Mission Accomplished " : On May 2, 2003, Bush

officials halted, the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft

carrier on its way home, some thirty miles off San

Diego, so that our warrior President, instead of

walking up a gangplank, could arrive far more

dramatically by jet, mug with the troops, get photo

ops galore, and then address his " fellow Americans " on

the carrier deck against the backdrop of a specially

prepared banner that proclaimed " mission

accomplished. " The first sentences of his now-infamous

speech included: " [M]ajor combat operations in Iraq

have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States

and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition

is engaged in securing and reconstructing that

country. "

 

At the time, it was meant as, and in our then-supine

media generally hailed as, the crowning moment in a

pre-electoral campaign guaranteed to nail down a

second-term in office. Most observers could already

imagine the election-season ads (as well as the

pathetic Democrats slinking back to their holes). So

here we are only a year and three months later, a mere

blink even in political time, and every aspect of this

scenario has been ambushed. Hardly a bit of it

remains. The landing on the deck, so heroic looking

then, proved in the end but a reminder of the

President's mission-unaccomplished Vietnam-era service

in and around the Texas Air National Guard, a record

that continues to dog him and has become central to

John Kerry's campaign.

 

As for that " Mission Accomplished " banner, only six

months later, the President felt so pressed that he

denied (wrongly) it had anything to do with him or his

administration. ( " The 'Mission Accomplished' sign, of

course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham

Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I

know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious

advance man from my staff -- they weren't that

ingenious, by the way. " ) As for those major combat

operations that were over, hundreds of dead Americans

and thousands of dead Iraqis later, Marines have been

battling " hand to hand " with Shiite rebels in the

streets of Najaf in combat major enough to involve

tanks, helicopters, and jets bombing in a major urban

area. The front page of the Sunday New York Times had

a photo of smoke and flames in Najaf with the caption:

" Battles yesterday between an American-Iraqi force and

a militant Shiite militia in Najaf left much of the

downtown area in ruins. "

 

Most of Iraq, in fact, has blinked off any map of

American control and looks ready to explode; our Iraqi

leader, Iyad Allawi, seems now to be little more than

the mayor of parts of Baghdad, and as for that

" reconstruction, " here's a little description from the

Los Angeles Times of life in the Baghdad slum of Sadr

city today where jobs, electricity, water, and most

everything else remain in desperately short supply:

 

" Typhoid and hepatitis E are running rampant

through Sadr City this summer, as residents rely

heavily on a sewage-tainted water supply to endure

temperatures of 115 degrees and up… 'If I showed you

the water in our house, you would not believe it,'

said Taiha Abdel Reda, 45. 'We turn on the tap and the

water has a foul smell and we see threads of [human

waste] in it.'

 

" Those who end up hospitalized don't fare much

better. Nuwesri said his hospital often uses water

that's 'just as contaminated as the water in the

homes.' "

 

The set of linked insurgencies in Iraq that have

driven the American occupiers to complete (if violent)

distraction may prove the greatest " May, June, July,

August, September, October… " surprise in the books. As

the insurgency continues in one unexpected form or

another to drive the administration willy-nilly toward

the November polls, the story is likely to remain at

or near the front pages of our newspapers and the top

of the night's news. Between now and November, despite

a clear American decision to crush the Shiite

opposition immediately, things are only likely to get

worse. Stay tuned on this one.

 

2. Those missing jobs: As Larry Elliot, the British

Guardian's economics editor, reported this week (using

a quote stronger than those found in most U.S.

papers): " The 32,000 July increase in non-farm

payrolls -- described as 'shockingly low' by one

financial analyst -- was almost 200,000 down on market

predictions and led to a sharp sell-off in shares and

the dollar. " This week's dismal job report, commented

Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen of the Washington

Post, " took administration and Bush campaign officials

by surprise. Bush's aides had been expecting a number

that several called 'decent.' Bush officials had been

reveling in Kerry's failure to make notable gains in

polls after last week's Democratic convention. The

jobs number abruptly ended the celebration. " Talk

about being blindsided by reality.

 

The Bush campaign was left with dueling headlines, as

in the Post, that read like this: Payroll Growth Slows

Dramatically in July vs. Bush Assures Voters the

Economy Is Improving, with the President still on the

stump turning that corner. Peter Preston, also of the

Guardian, wrote:

 

" Stumping round in the wake of Bush and Kerry last

week, I was struck by how strained the President

looks, and how thin his message sounds. Does the tale

of a million jobs created bring crowds to their feet?

No: especially after July, it shuffles into silence.

Tax cuts? You've had them. Add in health and education

spiels which might have been lifted entire from his

2000 election manifesto and the rest is tired

rhetoric. 'Four more years, four more years'… It is

not much of a pitch, and he seems to know it. There's

an anxiety about his campaign you can cut with a Bowie

knife. "

 

3. The wimpy Democrats turn into an opposition: This

is clearly a case of the vole that roared. After all,

the Democrats had been declared hardly even a party

and written off as dead back when Bush landed on that

carrier. The " mission " had been " accomplished, " or so

it was then believed, as much against the Democrats

(and the media) as against Saddam Hussein. They had,

until then, proved incapable of mounting an opposition

to anything or discovering anyone who might be a

" viable " candidate against the President in 2004. They

were without a hope, a prayer, or any evidence of a

backbone; and yet a little over a year later, they

emerged from their convention (thank you, Howard Dean;

thank you, Dennis Kucinich; thank you, Al Sharpton)

angry, unified, determined to win the election,

determined not to let Florida or any other state be

stolen from them, determined not to be wimpified in

some tank turret, and determined not to be terrorized

by a war-on-terror president. If this wasn't a July

surprise, I don't know what one might be. That any

Democratic candidate, no less a candidate little

beloved in the Party (as the T-shirt of a Dean

delegate put it, " I am in an arranged marriage with

John Kerry. " ) can be running slightly ahead of George

Bush in the polls right now is one of the less

believable events of recent times. But believe it. The

Republicans are starting to.

 

4. Oil prices: Here's a genuine ambush. Remember when

early summer oil prices peaked at about $40 a barrel

and then were supposed to fall. The Saudis swore they

would make it so, but here we are with CNN posting

headlines like " Oil could touch $50 " (A piece that

began: " When the price of oil crossed $40 a barrel

earlier this year, it generated nervous headlines and

anxiety on Wall Street and likely threw cold water on

the U.S. economy. Now it seems that $40 a barrel may

have been just a step on the way to even higher

prices, with $50 or more a distinct possibility in the

short term, according to some analysts. " ) Oil bad news

is coming from every direction. There's the Yukos oil

company disaster in Russia; those endlessly sabotaged

pipelines in Iraq; Nigerian oil strikes and who knows

what else. Conspiracy theorists could have a field day

with this, but Juan Cole explains the situation quite

cogently. My question is: Where are all those

airlifted-out Saudis when the Bush administration

really needs them?

 

5. Leaks and memoirs: An administration with a

reputation for being the most " disciplined " and " on

message " in history, for keeping the press on the

shortest leash since Abu Ghraib, has suddenly found

itself charging madly into the valley of leaks.

Starting in the Spring it seemed that every

battened-down sector of the Washington bureaucracy had

sprung a few, while former administration members

began kissing-and-telling directly onto 60 Minutes and

so to the top of bestseller lists: Treasury Secretary

Paul O'Neill, terrorism " tsar " Richard Clarke, the

CIA's " Anonymous " (whose unflattering book just hit

bestseller lists this weekend), and the various

leakers and interviewees to the Washington Post's Bob

Woodward for his Plan of Attack, not to speak of

Joseph Wilson's Niger uranium oped in the New York

Times (and subsequent book). There was former Centcom

commander Anthony Zinni denouncing the

administration's Iraq policies, former Pentagon

official Karen Kwiattowski denouncing the Pentagon

neocons all over the Internet, and various former

spooks, military men, State Department officials, and

intelligence analysts all spilling their guts. There

were memoirists to the left of them, leakers to the

right of them…

 

In the meantime, just when the administration thought

that they had at least successfully set up their own

private prison system out there in the imperial

darkness beyond the reach of any court, including the

Supremes, beyond the sight, no less oversight of

anyone, they were tripped up by modern technology --

the digital camera, email, and the Internet -- and a

single reporter who had done the same thing over in

the Vietnam era. First of course, there were those

high-tech postcards from the edge ( " Hi, Mom! Here I am

riding camels and creating dog piles. Wish you were

here! Love… " ), and then there was Seymour Hersh of the

New Yorker magazine running a one-man leak brigade on

torture in the provinces, and then, of course, there

were those administration torture memos and reports

which just began oozing out, and then the Supremes

jumped in… drip, drip, drip…

 

6. What if you threw a coronation party and no one

came (part 1): At the end of July, just after a Reagan

(Ron) appeared before the Democratic convention to

urge a November vote for stem-cell research (and so

for Kerry), Republican operatives held out hope that

Nancy Reagan would take to the Republican stage in

August in a kind of riposte to her son. ( " Republican

National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie made it clear

today that he salivates at the prospect of Mrs. Reagan

in New York. " ) But stories soon began to surface

indicating that she would not attend the convention

(and that the blindsided Bush team was teed off about

this). Though she has since pledged " 150% support " for

Bush's reelection, she continues to decline to put her

body on the line for the President who refuses to

support her on stem-cell research. Imagine, then, that

the only Reagan who has entered the electoral fray

this campaign season has just written an article for

Esquire magazine entitled The Case Against George W.

Bush. Talk about surprises, who woulda thunk it?

 

Kerry has just seized the stem-cell issue (and support

for breakthrough scientific research) and is launching

a series of " high-profile events " around it this week.

" 'This is an issue with legs,' said Democratic

pollster Peter Hart, who has measured 70 percent

support nationwide for embryonic stem cell research "

-- though not so long ago this was assumed to be an

issue of little political use except as Bush

administration red-meat for its fundamentalist base.

 

7. What if you threw a coronation and nobody came

(part 2): On Saturday, Robin Wright of the Washington

Post revealed the following: " The most popular

Republican in the country will not be speaking at the

Republican National Convention. The party's number one

asset, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, will not

even be there -- and may not be in the United States,

according to U.S. officials " ; nor will Condi Rice and

Donald Rumsfeld, evidently, though for different

reasons I would guess. Rumsfeld and most of the

neocons have simply disappeared from sight (at least

until a second term). Imagine, the man who was the

administration's top stand-up comic and general " stud

muffin " back in the good old days of Mission

Accomplished is now, perhaps by campaign fiat, MIA.

 

Powell is another story entirely. A few months back,

he suddenly announced that he was pressing CIA

director George Tenet (you remember him, don't you?)

to explain how exactly he had gotten all that terrible

Iraqi intelligence for his UN speech. It was, it

seemed to me, a signal to the rest of the boys at

State that they could leak at will (which, as far as I

can tell, they proceeded to do). And now, he's going

fishing during the Republican convention! " 'As

secretary of state, I am obliged not to participate in

any way, shape, fashion, or form in parochial,

political debates. I have to take no sides in the

matter,' Powell told the Unity: Journalists of Color

Convention on Thursday. Powell was a featured speaker

at the 2000 convention and even campaigned with Bush. "

 

Imagine that! Condi and he were the diversity stars at

the last Bush convention. But Sean McCormick, a

National Security Council spokesman, offered this

explanation for the absence of his boss: " By tradition

and custom, the national security adviser does not

actively participate in campaign or political events. "

Remind me of the last time " tradition and custom "

stood in the way of Karl Rove.

 

8. Afghanistan: Our 10,000 troops in Afghanistan

having quietly been upped to 20,000, American

casualties are on the rise in the land -- and war --

that time forgot. Two American soldiers and their

Afghan translator were killed and another American

wounded by an IED or roadside bomb (shades of Iraq)

just this weekend. Meanwhile, in a grim sign of Aghan

instability, after 24 years of continuous service

through the worst of times, the esteemed NGO Médecins

sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) has only now

shut down its operations in the country after five of

its workers were murdered. Our man in Afghanistan,

Hamid Karzai, is known as the " mayor of Kabul. "

Opium-growing has outrun all bounds, warlordism is

rife, and a resurgent Taliban insurgency continues to

grow in the southern parts of the country (though

registration for voting in the upcoming elections is

surprisingly high). Events there too could ambush the

Bush administration any time in coming months.

 

9. Things to come category (part 1): Scandals, leaks,

commissions, reports, investigations: Don't get me

started. What if one or more administration official

actually gets indicted by the Fitzgerald grand jury in

the Plame case; or Hersh finally fully breaks that

child torture, abuse, and sodomy story in Iraq (with

soundtrack); or something really breaks on Halliburton

and the Veep, or one of the investigatory groups in

the Abu Ghraib scandal actually reaches up into the

administration and nails someone; or… but the

possibilities are endless and there's nothing like a

wounded administration to bring them out.

 

10. Things to come category (part 2): What if Al-Qaeda

doesn't strike in the U.S. before November 2? I know

its rash of me to say, but this might prove the real

October surprise: The administration doesn't find

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda doesn't carry out a

domestic terror attack before or on election day.

September 11th happened, as we now know in copious

detail, because just about no one was looking while

those al-Qaeda operatives and their " Saudi muscle "

entered the U.S. fairly openly, trained for their

flights, and bought their box-cutters. But with people

even half-looking, half-efficiently, it's a far harder

task to get that Saudi muscle in and organize an

operation here. While I don't discount the dangers, I

still consider such an attack unlikely soon.

 

So those of your intent on October or November

surprises, at least remember that we're not the only

ones they're likely to be aimed at. As the Bush

administration limps toward November 2, guns drawn,

wagons circled, ready for a fight, but unsure over

which horizon, from behind which rocky knoll the next

surprise may spring, keep in mind that reality's the

great white shark and there's blood in the water.

 

Read dispatches by Tom Engelhardt throughout the week

at Tomdispatch.com, a web log of The Nation Institute.