It was a hullaballoo, all right. Not all of the Republicans liked my stunt, since one of these days they would have the whip hand over a Democratic President, and besides, this was saying that they weren’t that important, either. I sort of apologized to them, but held firm, and suggested that they start beating on the Dems about this. Push the bipartisan nature of what I was trying to do. Push that we needed a full Supreme Court. Push that it was costing the American taxpayer by delaying court proceedings. Wrap these appointments in an American flag and fly the damn thing!
By March, Reid caved in. We allowed a token Democrat and a token Republican judge to be non-confirmed, after negotiating with both of them (they both found lucrative positions in the private sector), confirmed everybody else, and scheduled confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominees. Harry Reid and I kissed and made up on television, in a wonderful bipartisan show of support. As I stood next to him I debated wearing body armor.
In March we had hearings on Katrina and Rita and the Federal response. As predicted, Mike Brown was front and center for almost a week, as every Democrat reamed him a new one and every Republican praised him to the sky. Not a damn one of them cared a lick about what happened, but they all wanted air time and sound bites to use during their upcoming campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the formal report was scheduled to be issued after the election, and early indications indicated that despite the rhetoric coming from the Congressional hearings, most of the problems were going to be blamed squarely on Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco. Mike Brown resigned right after the July 4th holiday, and we jointly introduced his replacement at a Press Room briefing, and I sent him out with a party and a public commendation. Screw Harry Reid!
That was just part of what happened between the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006, of course. Katrina was just one of the issues I had to face. Right now I was continuing the slow and steady pace I had always proclaimed. I wasn’t cutting taxes. We seemed to be at a good point for reasonable economic growth and a moderate surplus. The surplus paid off the older debt and gave us a cushion for disasters, like Katrina. As always, it was better to have a disaster with money in the bank than having to borrow it. Meanwhile we had cancelled enough pie-in-the-sky military programs to free up the funds to ramp up training and begin a pivot away from Europe and towards Asia. The F-35 was dead, as was the next generation Navy destroyer/cruiser package, and I had ordered a new frigate design instead of the ridiculous ‘Littoral Combat Ship’ that the Navy had pushed. Support assets had been heavily beefed up, and we had massively expanded and improved our facilities on Guam and the surrounding islands. Interestingly, some of our local allies seemed rather heartened by this. They could see the Chinese putting huge sums into their own military and were getting nervous. The Philippines, for example, had previously kicked us out, and were now making gestures at allowing us access to the old Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base facilities. Meanwhile we were drawing down our assets in Europe.
Overseas, we were continuing to keep the lid on things without having to invade anybody. I had small Special Forces teams assigned to the Kurds. North Korea I was pointedly ignoring. The current South Korean administration was making accommodating noises to their northern brethren, who were waving the nuclear flag and demanding money. I told the South Koreans they could do what they wanted, but the U.S. wasn’t coughing up a dime, and we weren’t making any concessions. Iran we had sanctions on, and we kept them in place, and thumbed our noses at them and Iraq in general. Afghanistan had settled down into a nice little civil war, and we were providing low levels of support to the Northern Alliance. We were also kissing up to India, to try and wean them from the Russians, and keep the Pakistanis under control.
The wheels began to come off that finely crafted strategy in February of 2006. Turkey announced they were building a new oil pipeline extending to the Iraqi border in Kurdistan, and were looking forward to making a deal for Kurdish oil with the semi-autonomous government in Erbil. At that point Saddam Hussein began mouthing off. The Kurds were nothing more than a bunch of rebels (true) and the oil was the property of the Iraqi people (read that as his property.) The Iraqi nation demanded that Turkey break off their illegal theft of Kurdish territory and property. Also, the Kurds should behave and get in line to allow him to kill them off easier.
Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey basically told Hussein where to head in. The Turks had a reputation for being tough fighters, and they had decent weaponry through NATO and modern purchases. Their national economy was also quite a bit stronger than Iraq’s. Meanwhile, the Kurds also told Hussein to go pound salt. The no-fly zone was being rigorously enforced, and I had zero interest in loosening it.
Reconnaissance overflights, satellite intelligence, and signal intercepts all began raising the possibility that Hussein might be contemplating something in terms of ground action, but it wasn’t clear yet what was happening. The National Security Council was informed by Richard Clarke in mid-February that the Republican Guard was moving troops and mechanized units into the no-fly zone and towards the Kurdish boundary areas. A major concentration was in the vicinity south of Kirkuk, one of the areas Hussein had ‘Arabized’ by moving in lots of Sunnis to work in the oil fields and then kicked out a lot of the Kurds.
Part of the brief by Richard was the past history of Hussein against the Kurds. Put bluntly, the man was a genocidal maniac. Depending on time frame and specifics, he had killed off anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 Kurds over the years, and had used chemical weapons on more than one occasion. Now it looked like he was gearing up to go at them again. If we let him, the result would be predictable. Kurds would stream across the borders into Turkey, Syria, and Iran, potentially destabilizing all three countries, something that would only benefit Hussein. As it was, under stable conditions they had actually been moving into Iraq. Turkey had found one of the best benefits to cooperation with the Kurds over a pipeline; it calmed down the PKK, the Kurdish Worker’s Party militia in the eastern provinces, who tended towards guerilla attacks on the Turks.
The best current intelligence was that Hussein was either preparing for an attack on Kurdistan, or was simply trying to provoke us into doing something stupid and then playing the martyr for the Arab world. “That’s the best you have, Richard? That he’s either going to attack or he’s not going to attack?” I asked sarcastically.
“Mister President, that’s the best we can say right now. The preparations you make are the same. He might not even know at the moment. He might just want to scare people and make up his mind later,” Richard added.
He wasn’t backing down, or trying to give me an answer I wanted. I could live with that. I looked around the room. I shrugged and nodded. “Let’s look at this as two parts. What do we do now to try and deter the bastard, and what do we do next if he attacks anyway?” There was a murmur of agreement at that. I looked back at Clarke. “When would their preparations be ready? If they attack into Kurdistan, what would be the timetable and what would be their objectives?”