Only in foreign policy does a President actually have any room to maneuver. He can launch the country into war or run away from one. He can meet foreign dignitaries, negotiate treaties, make state visits, and impersonate somebody much more important than he really is. The Congress back home might not go along with him, but that is always the case. We do have checks and balances, so they can defund his wars, refuse to ratify his treaties, demand hearings and cooperation, and otherwise make his life miserable. Still, a lot of what he does overseas can be summed up under the general saying, ‘It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.’
If it works, you can look, well, Presidential! You are a leader striding the world stage! You can look solid and decisive, and bring pride to the country. You screw up and you look like a fucking moron, and the rest of the world knows it. Not all our Presidents have been able to pull this off. It was an awful thing to say of the man, but it was the primary reason I had maneuvered him into the World Trade Center on 9-11. George W. Bush was clueless on foreign policy. He allowed himself to be led around by people with an agenda and blundered his way into a pair of disastrous wars. Equally awful, and in some ways even more dangerous, his domestic and fiscal policies involved borrowing staggering sums from the Chinese and other foreign lenders, who suddenly felt that they had a lot more to say about the world than they otherwise deserved.
We had managed to avoid a long term war in Afghanistan, and the Kurdish War was probably going to cost around $120 billion. That’s a lot of money, I will grant you, but it was basically a one-time event. On my first go, fighting two wars simultaneously had cost about $300 billion a year for over ten years in a row. Further, he had lowered taxes drastically, and had been in a deficit situation almost from the beginning. I had kept taxes at the point where he had left them after his first budget, 5 % lower than the Clinton years. We had suffered a deficit in 2002 (9-11), 2006 (Hurricane Katrina), and would do so again in 2007 (Kurdish War). On the other hand, we had shown significant surpluses in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005, more than sufficient to pay for the deficits and continue to pay down the national debt.
Congress hated me for this. The Republicans wanted to lower taxes and damn the deficit, and the Democrats wanted to raise spending and damn the deficit. This was completely understandable, but only in the most self-aggrandizing sense possible. By either raising spending or lowering taxes, they were heroes to their constituents, and would get re-elected. Mind you, by constituents I wasn’t referring to the voters. The average Washington politician couldn’t care less about the voters. They were generally considered clueless sheep. No, the important people they had to impress were the lobbyists who represented their core interests. Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big You-Name-It — they were the ones who coughed up the campaign contributions necessary to pay for the television ads aimed at the sheep.
It was an unbelievably corrupt system. It had been bad enough in 1990 when I had first gotten into politics. Only the fact that I had enough cash that I could ignore the lobbyists allowed me to stay reasonably true to the voters. Since then it had gotten exponentially worse. Mind you, the lobbyists, the guys with the cash, thought the system was working just fine, and for them it was. Even I was complicit in this. I had about $25 million a year of my own money flowing into the American Renaissance Initiative that allowed me to buy enough politicians to get some stuff passed. I had managed to become one of the largest lobbyists in Washington!
The morality of all of this was questionable at best. The legality was considerably less of an issue. If it was illegal, I could always spend enough lobbying money to make it legal. It was enough to give a Jesuit logician a headache.
In the meantime, we arranged a Middle Eastern visit for the end of May. I couldn’t do it any sooner than that for the simple reason that Holly was graduating on the 21st of May. Our little girls were growing up and moving on with their lives. Holly was graduating cum laude with a Bachelors of Science in Physics. Molly was doing equally well, but was just finishing the fourth year of the five year combined Bachelors/Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering. For once I refused to speak at a graduation. I simply wanted to be Dad and watch my baby graduate. Holly had already been accepted into the graduate program at Princeton, probably one of the best physics programs in the nation, and the rest of us were simply going to be the average family, assuming average families were surrounded by Secret Service agents.
The following weekend was to be the beginning of the Middle Eastern trip, but we weren’t leaving until Sunday the 28th. Saturday the 27th I was scheduled to speak to the graduating class at West Point. It had been four years since the first time I had spoken there. That had been the first class after 9-11, and the class that Roscoe Buckminster had graduated in. How many of those boys that had graduated that day had I killed since then? Now I was going back, to spout more patriotic bullshit to the boys and girls after our latest war.
It was a supremely depressing take on the whole affair, but I knew it wasn’t accurate. I had been a captain, a battery commander. If I had managed to stay in and stay healthy, I had been already scheduled to do a tour as a battery commander at Sill, and then to attend Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth. Following CGS I would have done a staff tour somewhere, and then taken command of a battalion as a lieutenant colonel. (This all assumed I managed to avoid stepping on my crank in the process, questionable at best. At every rank there is a Darwinian selection process at work, and the higher you go, the tougher it gets.) The important thing to remember was that by the time I made it to battalion command, I would have to accept the loss of subordinates as a cost of doing business, or I would never have been able to maintain my sanity.
Now was simply the same thing on a larger scale. By any measure, the Kurdish War was far and away the most lopsided war in history, even including the initial losses following the Iraqi attack. Kurdish Dragon had been the stuff of legend, a performance worthy of the history books. The Army had proven that the Gulf War was not a onetime event. The Republican Guard hadn’t been beaten, it had been annihilated. The ratio of forces involved and the ratio of losses inflicted was one for the records! The Battle of the Azwya Valley and the Destruction of the 1st Hammurabi would be studied on the sand tables for a generation. By any objective measure, the numbers of losses had been very low, but that didn’t mean much to those boys’ parents.
I mentioned some of this to Marilyn, both sides of it. She understood and had a simple response. Shut up, smile, and fake it! Marilyn is nothing if not practical. I just smiled and agreed with her, and started writing. I ended with the following.
“Four years ago I spoke here, and I sent that class out into a world changed by the events of 9-11. I told them then that this was a damn dirty business we are in. Those young men and women are most likely first lieutenants right now, with maybe a few captains thrown in. Their pay isn’t the world’s greatest and there is never enough leave to do the things they want. They have missed holidays and birthday parties while standing watches and doing duty. Some have had children born while they were deployed. Others have spent time in hospital, recovering from wounds and injuries received on duty. Regrettably, some have paid the ultimate price for serving their country.