Legal Commentary

Oral history of the Bush White House

By Tom Kirkendall

When you have a spare hour or so, check out this "Oral History of the Bush White House" by Cullen Murphy, Todd Purdum and Philippe Sands in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

The format of the article is a timeline recreating of the last eight years with participants' observations on many of the major moments and a number of minor ones, which often end up being as instructive as the reactions to the major ones.

The entire article is a must-read, but the following observations of Kenneth Adelman, a member of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board, will give you a flavor.

The context of Adelman's comments are a confrontation that he had with the Defense Secretary several days after Rumsfeld had dismissed the significance of the breakdown of civil order in Iraq by publicly observing that "stuff happens":

So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.

Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.

I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?

So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.

And so that was not a successful conversation.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on January 24, 2009 (boomark / email).