The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  The victims of Al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were not so certain about the Taliban or their guests. The bombs detonated ten minutes apart, killing more than two hundred people. Two years later, Al-Qaeda struck again with a suicide attack against the USS Cole. Clinton then gave the okay to kill bin Laden at his base camp in Afghanistan. After the bombings, Unocal pulled out of the pipeline deal, but others remained interested. Enron, whose chief executive Ken Lay was a major backer of George W. Bush, envisioned building a pipeline that could supply cheap natural gas to Enron’s faltering Dabhol power plant in India. Dick Cheney, who had become CEO of Halliburton, also set his sights on oil reserves. He told a 1998 gathering of oil industry executives, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”70

  Although the United States faced no clear threat from hostile nations, the Clinton administration squandered the promised peace dividend in a new wave of military spending. In January 2000, it added $115 billion to the Pentagon’s projected Five Year Defense Plan, bringing the total to $1.6 trillion and proving that Democrats were even more tough-minded on defense than their Republican adversaries. It continued spending profusely on missile defense, even though experts warned that the costly system would never function as envisioned and enemies and allies alike feared that its pursuit indicated that the United States was striving to achieve a dangerous first-strike capability. Clinton also refused to sign the Ottawa land mines treaty and oversaw an increase in U.S. arms sales from 32 percent of the world market in 1987 to 43 percent a decade later, the lion’s share going to countries with deplorable human rights records.

  The greatest pressure for increased military spending came from a single-minded group of neoconservatives, spearheaded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in 1997, formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC harked back to Henry Luce’s vision of unchallenged U.S. global hegemony. The group’s founding statement of principles deplored the fact that the United States had lost its way under Clinton and called for return to “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” The founders claimed a direct lineage from Scoop Jackson’s bunker to Team B to the Committee on the Present Danger, with a few minor detours along the way. They were a far cry from Carter’s Trilateralists. The original signers included Elliott Abrams, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter, businessman Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred Ikle, historian Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Norman Podhoretz, former Vice President Dan Quayle, Henry Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.71 They and other members and collaborators, including Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Richard Allen, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes, and former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, would dominate political discourse and policy making during the George W. Bush administration as completely as the Trilateralists had dominated Carter’s. The consequences would prove even more damaging for humanity—far more damaging, in fact—than the misguided policies implemented by the Brzezinski-dominated Carter administration.72

  PNACers laid out their program in a series of reports, letters, and statements. They demanded increased defense spending, completion of the United States’ domination of space, and deployment of a sweeping missile defense system. They insisted that the United States be able to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” and police “critical regions,” especially the oil-rich Middle East. Their first order of business was toppling Saddam Hussein and establishing a new government under the aegis of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. In January 1998, PNACers urged Clinton to circumvent the UN Security Council and take unilateral military action. But Saddam hadn’t provided sufficient provocation.

  Since the Gulf War, UN weapons inspectors had been overseeing destruction of Iraq’s WMD. U.S.-and British-enforced no-fly zones and harsh UN sanctions had caused immense suffering. In an interview with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Lesley Stahl noted, “We have heard that a half million children have died. . . . that’s more children than died in Hiroshima,” and asked, “is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

  Experts would debate the precise number of Iraqi children who died as a result of the sanctions. In December 1995, two UN-affiliated researchers, writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, placed the number at 567,000 but later lowered that estimate. In 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, speaking at a joint press conference with George Bush, said, “Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease,” using that as an excuse to justify an invasion that would add tens of thousands more to that total.73

  Though Clinton resisted the pressure to invade, he and his secretary of state laid the rhetorical groundwork for Bush and Cheney. Albright warned, “Iraq is a long way from [the United States], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”74 On another occasion, Albright had the audacity to declare, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”75

  Clearly, neither Albright nor Clinton saw very far into the past. In late October 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which asserted, “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”76 Saddam immediately stopped inspections but backed down under the threat of war in mid-November and allowed the inspections to continue.

  Albright’s hawkishness rankled the more sober-minded members of the administration. During one discussion, Albright asked, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell recalled, “I thought I would have an aneurysm. American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board.”77

  The 2000 election was the most scandalous in U.S. history. George W. Bush defeated John McCain in an ugly Republican primary that laid the groundwork for the tactics he would use in the general election. Bush shed his compassionate conservatism and attacked McCain furiously from the right. He reached out to the neo-Confederates, unreconstructed segregationists who fought to keep the rebel flag flying over the South Carolina state capitol. He spoke at Bob Jones University, whose claim to fame was its policy of banning interracial dating among students. But most notoriously, Karl Rove and the Bush brain trust planted the idea that McCain, “the fag candidate,” had fathered an illegitimate black daughter and his wife, Cindy, was a drug addict. McCain responded, “The political tactics of division and slander are not our values . . . those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.”78 McCain was correct, but the tactic worked among a Republican Party base that was moving sharply to the right.

  For his running mate, Bush selected Dick Cheney, who had fortuitously been put in charge of vetting potential nominees. Republicans hoped that Cheney, a veteran of several administrations and six terms in Congress, would lend gravitas to a ticket headed by the lightly regarded, inexperienced former Texas governor. Cheney had made a fortune during his brief stint as CEO of Halliburton, retiring in 2000 with a $34 million severance package. In 1998, he merged Halliburton with Dresser Industries, forming the world’s biggest oil services firm. Halliburton was also a major defense contractor through its subsidiary Brown & Root. Bush and Cheney faced off against Vice President Al Gore and Senator Joe Lieberman. The race was
complicated by the participation of reformer Ralph Nader and conservative Pat Buchanan.

  As the elections approached, polls indicated a tight outcome. Bush advisors feared their candidate would win the popular vote but lose in the electoral college. They readied plans to orchestrate a popular uprising accusing Gore of using the antiquated electoral college to thwart the public will.

  The election was very close indeed. Nationally, Gore won the popular vote by 544,000. Winning Florida would have also given him victory in the electoral college. The majority of Florida voters clearly intended to vote for Gore. But confusing “butterfly ballots” in West Palm Beach caused many elderly Jewish voters to inadvertently vote for Buchanan, who was sometimes accused of anti-Semitism and whom those voters, in particular, despised, and antiquated punch card machines in poor, heavily Democratic districts caused state officials to invalidate 180,000 ballots either for not clearly identifying a candidate or for voting more than once. But most troubling was that tens of thousands of pro-Gore African-American voters had been purged from the voting lists and denied the right to vote by Republican election officials, who had been directed to do so by the Bush Florida campaign cochair, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, on the pretext, often incorrect, that they were convicted felons. In the end, more than 10 percent of African Americans were disqualified compared to only 2 percent of Republican-leaning whites. Had the rates been equal, more than 50,000 more African Americans would have voted in Florida, giving Gore an overwhelming lead and ensuring his election. But because of the irregularities and the 97,000 votes that went to Nader, Bush clung to a minuscule lead of less than 1,000 votes out of 6 million cast. If certified, Bush would win the election by 271–266 electoral college votes.

  The deck was stacked against Gore. Bush’s younger brother Jeb was governor. Harris, a fierce partisan, was in charge of certifying the results. Partial recounts cut Bush’s lead below 600 votes. Fearing that the full state recount Gore demanded would sink him, Bush deployed family consigliere James Baker, his father’s campaign manager and secretary of state, to use every available court challenge to block the recount. The Bush campaign also flew down a small army of members of Congress, congressional staffers, and lawyers to run the operation on the ground, many arriving in corporate jets leased to the campaign by Bush’s friend “Kenny Boy” Lay of Enron and Cheney’s friends at Halliburton.

  The ground operation was overseen by House Republican Whip Tom DeLay. Some 750 Republican operatives swarmed into three predominantly Democratic counties that were considering recounts. At raucous rallies, they portrayed themselves as local citizens outraged that Gore was stealing the election, a theme echoed by Republican media allies. On November 22, the Republican field army, fortified by right-wing Cubans, physically disrupted the Miami-Dade canvassing board’s attempt to examine almost 11,000 disputed ballots in what the Wall Street Journal called a “door-kicking, window-banging protest.” The fifty-person mob, which included staffers of DeLay and Senator Trent Lott, was led by New York Congressman John Sweeney, who started them chanting “Shut it down!,” “Three blind mice,” and “Fraud, fraud, fraud.” Members of the canvassing board were physically assaulted, and Supervisor of Elections David Leahy was punched. One thousand more Cuban Americans, they were told, were on the way. The Brooks Brothers Riot, as it was dubbed because of the well-dressed insurgents, achieved its goal, forcing frightened board members to abandon their recount, which, the Journal reported, was expected to help Gore “chip away” at Bush’s lead.

  The operatives repeated their performance in heavily Democratic Broward County, outnumbering Democratic protesters outside the courthouse by ten to one. Among those observing the shutdown of the Miami-Dade canvassing board was Wall Street Journal editorial writer Paul Gigot, who commented, “If it’s possible to have a bourgeois riot, it happened here Wednesday. And it could end up saving the presidency for George W. Bush.”79

  Harris disallowed other recounts and certified Bush the winner by 537 votes. Though outspent in Florida by more than four to one, Gore continued to fight through the courts. On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of all ballots recorded as showing no vote or more than one vote in cases where names were both checked and written in. With his lead falling below 200 votes, Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the recount. Seven of the nine justices had been appointed by Republican presidents and five of the seven by administrations in which Bush’s father was either president or vice president. The Supreme Court voted 5–4 to stop the recount, handing Bush the election. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented, charging, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”80 Others alleged that an outright coup had occurred.

  Bush promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative.” But Cheney’s selection of right-wingers and neocons to fill key administration positions made clear that compassion and compromise would be in short supply. For defense secretary, the dour vice president–elect picked his mentor Donald Rumsfeld, whom Henry Kissinger had called “the most ruthless man I ever met.”81 Jim Baker reminded Bush, “you know what he did to your daddy,” referring to Rumsfeld’s effort to derail his father’s political career in the 1970s.82 But Bush took perverse pleasure in picking the man who had so openly defied his father. Rumsfeld, a man of prodigious arrogance, and Cheney, gloomy, dyspeptic, and pathologically secretive, would dominate foreign policy making, consistently riding roughshod over Secretary of State Colin Powell.

  Cheney was on a mission to restore the power of the executive branch, which had steadily eroded, he believed, since the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973 and Watergate. Sharing Cheney’s contempt for public opinion, Bush surrounded himself with yes-men and true believers. He told Bob Woodward, “I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”83 He held fewer press conferences than any other modern president, addressed only prescreened audiences, and set up special zones to isolate protesters far from his appearances.

  During the presidential election recount, on November 22, 2000, Republican operatives, fortified by right-wing Cubans, physically disrupted the Miami-Dade County canvassing board’s attempt to examine almost 11,000 disputed ballots in what the Wall Street Journal called a “door-kicking, window-banging protest.” The Brooks Brothers Riot, as it was dubbed because of the well-dressed insurgents, achieved its goal, forcing frightened board members to abandon their recount.

  From the start, serious debate over domestic policy concerns was conspicuous by its absence. One of the few who tried to instigate such discussions was John DiIulio, whom Bush had chosen to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. DiIulio, a respected political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who had previously taught at Harvard and Princeton, stuck out like a sore thumb in this administration. Not only were he and Treasury Secretary Norman Mineta the only Democrats in the administration, he was, according to journalist Ron Suskind, the administration’s “big brain.” Bush called him “one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America.” He was also one of the few who took seriously the commitment to “compassionate conservatism,” speaking, for example, about the need to save “the least, the last and the lost.”84

  Surrounded by neoconservative ideologues and harassed constantly by the religious Right, DiIulio lasted barely eight months. In October 2002, he opened up in a letter to Suskind in which he expressed admiration for the president, who, he said, was “much, much smarter than some people . . . seem to suppose” but criticized the environment in the White House, where, from the president on down, there was virtually no discussion of substantive domestic policy c
oncerns:

  There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues [and] only a couple people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis. . . . [The] lack of basic policy knowledge [is] somewhat breathtaking. . . . This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.85

  Whereas the first President Bush and Clinton had made some efforts at diplomacy and coalition building, Bush 43 exhibited the kind of “chest-thumping unilateralism” that neocons had demanded for decades. He announced that he would not send the International Criminal Court treaty to the Senate for ratification, despite the fact that Clinton had signed it and virtually every other Western democracy had joined. Perhaps he and Cheney anticipated that membership in the world’s first war crimes tribunal might interfere with their future plans. Bush then rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which 150 nations had signed. He repudiated the Kyoto Protocol on global warming; abrogated the ABM Treaty with Russia, which freed him to expand the costly and unproven missile defense program; disavowed the Middle East peace process; and suspended talks with North Korea on its long-range missile program. Cheney strategically positioned loyalists throughout the bureaucracy and worked closely with Rumsfeld to expand the role and influence of the Pentagon. Though lacking any popular mandate, Bush and Cheney proceeded to ride roughshod over the opposition, taking advantage of the fact that Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1920s.