GLOBAL COLUMN© BY TED CORDOVA

Cheney the chaperone

Vice Dick Cheney commands a war to destroy Saddam. It was not much of a surprise that vicepresident Cheney emerged from one of his misterious hideways calling the Nation for a war against Saddam Husseins' Iraq.

Why should it be? From the beginning of the current Administration, pundits of liberal mainstream media, said that Cheney was positioned as Vicepresident by suggestion of former President Bush, the father. It was so, in order to chaperone his son thru the proper paths inside the maze of global Geopolitics.

Everybody in US media notes that Cheney's speech, given to a veterans' group, was long-planned and meant to lay out a comprehensive argument for invading Iraq. "What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness," said Cheney, who emphasized Saddam's efforts to get nukes. "We will not simply look away, hope for the best, and leave the matter for some future administration to resolve."

Cheney also pooh-poohed the potential return of UN weapons inspectors,according to Slate Magazine (Intenet) saying that they would "provide no assurance whatsoever."

The NYTimes pointed out that some folks complained that the president, and not the Vicepresident, should be the one laying out the argument to takedown Saddam. President Bush is scheduled to give a speech about Iraq to the U.N. on Sept. 12.

NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof aired the position of "us feckless wimps" in the Iraq debate. He says that the question isn't whether Americans want Saddam outta there, it's at what cost.
The problem, says Kristof, is that President Bush, "intoxicated by moral clarity, has decided that whatever the cost, whatever the risks, he will invade Iraq. And that's not policy, but obsession."

The NewYorkTimes, WashingtonPost, and LosAngelesTimes all front a federal appeals court's ruling that the Bush administration was wrong to hold hundreds of post-9/11 deportation hearings in secret.

The White House had argued that such hearings had to be on held on the hush-hush because otherwise terrorists might have been able to glean some info from them. The court's "ruling" absolutely ripped the administration's position: The unanimous opinion noted, "The Executive Branch seeks to uproot people's lives outside the public eye and behind a closed door. Democracies die behind closed doors." The papers say that this is the first time that a federal appeals court, just one notch below the Supremes, has found a major component of Bush's anti-terror tact to be unconstitutional.

The Post fronts a piece on one of the big, undercovered stories of the past year: The U.S.'s new, anti-terror inspired, buddy-buddy relationship with Central Asian authoritarian regimes. The Post says that the State Dept calls its new policy towards the states one of "enhanced engagement." That means, as the paper explains it, that the U.S. is giving the countries--"none of which permits free politics or fair elections" (WashingtonPost)--few hundred million dollars worth of aid, while also encouraging them to try out a bit of democracy. The Post doesn't clarify to what degree the "encouragement" is just lip-service. For example, is any of the aid money tied to benchmarks on "democracy-building".

By the way, since secretary of State Colin Powell advocates a UN linked policy rgarding Iraq, it is obvious he was being targeted by Cheney's sarcastic volley. A reason to believe, as Time magazine has suggested, that Powell could be the first high level casualty of the so many times announced war against Iraq, to topple Saddam. The great suspicion about this Administrtion persists: To what extent is the son acting in the name of the father?

BIP