At that point, Fletcher Donaldson, a guest journalist on their 'Powerhouse Roundtable' who was now Washington bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun and an accredited White House Correspondent, replied, "Mister Secretary, you received five military deferments during the Viet Nam War, and President Buckman earned a Bronze Star for not leaving men on the battlefield. Are you sure you want to be making a statement like that?"
Dick pretty much lost it at that point, and told Fletcher, Sam Donaldson, and Cokie Roberts that I wasn't supposed to be the President, that George Bush had wanted me gone and wanted me to resign, and he should have been the President because Bush had promised it to him. Then he ran me down as a traitor to the office and to the Party. The looks of disbelief were astonishing. Ari brought me out to the morning Press Briefing the next day to refute everything Cheney had said, and I told the truth, that there had never been any such conversations, that no promises had been made, that I had never been asked to resign, etc. No, I couldn't explain Mister Cheney's bizarre behavior. All I had to do was look mystified, and refuse to speculate when somebody asked me if I thought Dick Cheney was suffering from something stress related.
So much for the current crop of neocons.
That didn't mean any of us could relax. All it would take was a single incident to go bad for the conservatives to call for my replacement, with somebody who would 'fix the problem, once and for all!' We had almost had such an incident with the 'Shoe Bomber', Richard Reid, last December, when an Islamic nutcase tried to ignite a shoe filled with explosives on a plane from overseas, and he couldn't manage to ignite the fuse. Dick Clarke was doing a decent job with the CIA, and Winston Creedmore with coordinating intelligence, and Congress had put the fear of God into a few bureaucrats with their investigation. We had managed to stop or capture at least a dozen bombers since 9-11, some foreign born and some home grown. One major help was that people had figured out all on their own that if somebody was fucking around, it was perfectly permissible to gang tackle them and let the authorities sort it out later. Thank you, Flight 93, for that valuable lesson.
One major discussion was about how much we let the public know. If we told people we had foiled a plot, the bad guys would invariably get information on how we foiled it, and then be able to change their tactics. If we didn't tell people then they had no idea of the level of danger and would think the problem was over and we didn't need to be careful. Whatever we did, we all pretty much came to the conclusion that we couldn't tell Congress jack shit, since it would be on television before we ever made it home. The Congressmen who heard about that were not amused, and called on the Administration to be more forthcoming, not less, and how they were trustworthy. That made it to the press as well, and how anybody was able to read that and listen to it with a straight face was miraculous.
Nobody had heard from bin Laden, though plenty of old videos were still circulating. Had he been killed? Was he buried in the rubble or a collapsed cave? Was he in hiding? Nobody knew, or if they knew, they weren't telling. Without a body, none of us dared claim he was dead; you just knew that five minutes after that were to occur, he would resurface on live television.
One thing popped up very quickly, and that was that the name Al Qaeda had lost its copyright status. Just like all copiers got called Xeroxes, now all Islamic terrorists were calling themselves Al Qaeda. Groups of assholes who had never heard of Osama Bin Laden before 9-11 were now calling themselves a branch of Al Qaeda. They figured it was good advertising, and a way to gain recruits and funds. CIA was reporting Al Qaeda groups popping up all over the world, most of whom had never met anybody in the original group.
Afghanistan had settled down into a low level civil war. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had taken a massive pounding, and the few survivors had fled across the mountains into Pakistan, leaving the country in the hands of the new warlords from the Northern Alliance. The Alliance was an alliance of convenience. The individual warlords had their own tribes and their own interests, and promptly settled down to low level fighting among themselves, usually over poppy territories and heroin distribution. Meanwhile, the Taliban was reconstituting itself in Pakistan, with help from the ISI, and was beginning to come back into Afghanistan, killing along the way. I would get reports from Clarke and Creedmore every few weeks, and it sounded like another low level civil war, much like what had evolved over more than a decade after the Russians left the country in 1989. All of our personnel had been yanked months ago, though Clarke still had a handful of agents present with the various Northern Alliance warlords. We funneled some arms to them to help them fight the Taliban, but otherwise kept our noses clean.
If Afghanistan didn't exist, somebody on acid would have had to invent it. Why anybody in their right mind wanted us to be there was beyond me!
Iraq simmered along much as it had during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Every few months they would make bellicose noises and violate the no-fly zones, or light up an American warplane with their fire control radar. Our response was predictable. We would shoot down the wandering intruder or destroy an anti-aircraft missile battery, and then toss a few cruise missiles at them. It was a low level of combat, enough to keep the Air Force and Navy pilots on their toes, and keep people well trained, and cost us a few billion dollars a year, but no lives. Compared to the cost of either invading the country, or letting Saddam Hussein run loose, that was cheap insurance.
As part of our surveillance on Iraq, Richard Clarke had what assets he had available, admittedly not many, on the ground in Iraq. One group of Arabic speakers was stationed in the Southern No-Fly Zone, where they spied on the Shiites and the Sunnis. They weren't noticeably successful at this. The Sunnis were the people supporting Hussein, and the Shiites were friendly with the nutcases over in Iran.
Much more successful were the agents we had on the ground in the Northern No-Fly Zone, which was centered over Kurdistan. The Kurds were mostly Sunnis, like Hussein, but of a slightly different flavor. Much more important was the fact that the Kurds were not of Arabic descent, and did not consider themselves Iraqi. This was one of those wonderful examples of the Western colonial powers sorting things out by just drawing lines on a map. Kurdistan, the ancestral homeland of the Kurdish people, was centered on northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the northern tip of Syria. They had been carrying on a low level guerilla war in most of these places, and really hated the Iraqis, who had gassed them on at least one occasion. Colin Powell and the State Department strongly recommended making nice with these people and trying to get them to make nice with Turkey, a NATO ally. I shrugged and went along with him. I still didn't trust the ragheads, but that was what we were paying Colin for, to jaw-jaw and not war-war.
In late August we took another family vacation, probably our last as a family, at Hougomont. Charlie took a few days of leave and joined us the weekend before the girls were supposed to go to college. It was hot, but nice. We didn't get there very often anymore. It was one thing when I was a Congressman. The Maryland Ninth was a fairly small district, and most of the residents knew I had a place in the Bahamas when I first ran for Congress. It was fairly simple for me to defuse the problem if anybody commented.
Not so as the President. It was an example that I was too rich and not one of the common people (like there were actually poor Congressmen and Senators who didn't vacation well.) Worse, I was vacationing somewhere in a foreign country, and not in the good old U.S. of A! My God, I was damn near a commie! At least half a dozen state governors, on both sides of the aisle, made public comments that there were many wonderful places in their states that would have been even nicer. (North Dakota? Really? I must have missed the sandy beaches in the travel brochure.)