LOYALTIES:

O'Neill Has Done His Country a Favor (Robert B. Reich, 1/16/04, Newsday)

Early this week, former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill sent tongues wagging and Republicans gasping when he claimed, in interviews and in a new book, that President George W. Bush intended to depose Saddam Hussein from the start - seven months before 9/11.

Hence, the whole thing was trumped up, an elaborate pretext. This is an extraordinary indictment. [...]

The central question his book raises isn't really the loyalty a cabinet officer owes a president. It's the loyalty a president and his inner circle owe to the country and to its democracy. If O'Neill is telling the truth - and we have no reason to doubt his veracity - there's serious doubt about the loyalty of this administration to America.

Let's assume that Mr. Reich doesn't mean what he implies, that 9-11 was "trumped up" to provide an excuse for war with Iraq two years later. But he must mean what he says, that he doubts the Administration's loyalty.

We might call that McCarthyism, except that the McCarthyite charge that American communists were loyal to the Sioviet Union rather than to their own country is a mere statement of fact. In most other circumstances it seems unwise to accuse people of disloyalty just because you don't believe their actions benefit the country, or even that they directly benefit our enemies. For instance, when someone like John Kerry supported the Nuclear Freeze movement, which the Soviet Union funded, it seems improbable that he was knowingly trying to help the Communist side in the Cold War. It may be the case that had the movement prevailed and the Reagan build-up been stopped the Bolsheviks would have been able to preserve their dictatorship, but it's hard to believe that Mr. Kerry opposed his own government for that reason. Far easier to accept the idea that he was an ignorant dupe who accidentally did KGB bidding.

Additionally, one wonders, in the present instance, just who it is Mr. Reich thinks the Administration owes its loyalty to. The prevailing answer--on the Left, far Right, and abroad--seems to be that they are part of some kind of World Zionist conspiracy, which wants to deal with regimes that threaten Israel even though they're no threat to America. The question then would be whether George W. Bush is a kind of evil mastermind behind this global plot or just a Kerry-like useful idiot. But neither Mr. O'Neill's book nor Mr. Reich's column offer a very satisfactory answer to this question.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2004 10:05 AM