Tag: war

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Editorial Opinion

Seasonal Memory

The dog days of August are upon us. And in Memphis, that means that after an hour in the sun your car feels like the inside of an Easy-Bake Oven; your nice leather seats burn the back of your thighs; the steering wheel scalds your hands. Ouch!

Wouldn’t it be a great time to take a vacation in cooler climes? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could take off the entire month and go to the beach or to your ranch? Sure it would. And that’s just what the Iraqi Parliament, the U.S. Congress, and the president of the United States are about to do: take a month off to relax.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, our soldiers continue to carry out the president’s desperate “surge,” battling 120-degree heat and bullets and bombs. They continue to fight and bleed and die, while those who sent them there are fishing and golfing and boating. They continue to battle for Iraqi “democracy,” while the democratically elected Iraqi government takes a break from doing what it’s been doing for years: nothing. They continue to battle tooth and claw for some undefinable “victory,” while the president plays cowboy and “clears brush” on his ranch.

There should be no vacation in wartime, at least no vacation that lasts a month. As we are regularly informed by the administration, we are in a “global war on terror.”

In August 2001, the president went on his annual 30-day vacation. While at his ranch, he was given a document that read “Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” While Bush continued his vacation, bin Laden continued working to create the attacks of 9/11. How soon we forget the lessons of history.

Better Next Time

As the guest speaker of the Memphis Rotary Club on Tuesday, Arkansas governor Mike Beebe focused his speech on the need for bordering governmental jurisdictions to shed their competitiveness and practice the virtues of cooperation.

The governor’s remarks were so softly, even blandly said that a visitor might never have guessed they had any particular relevance to a local situation. That they did, however, would become clear during the Q&A session that followed Beebe’s speech.

A Rotarian asked about Toyota’s recent decision to not to locate its new production plant in nearby Marion, Arkansas, or in Chattanooga, but in Tupelo, Mississippi — just distant enough from Beebe’s bailiwick and the Memphis work force not to benefit either very much.

The questioner wanted to know how much support advocates of a Marion location had received from Memphis and Shelby County officials. Beebe allowed as how there hadn’t been much but declined to blame anybody — neither Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, who was on the dais with him, nor the absent Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, both of whom more or less sat on their hands in deference, as the Arkansas governor gently acknowledged, to “Nashville,” where Governor Phil Bredesen was turning the screws on Chattanooga’s behalf.

The result? A standoff which allowed Tupelo to come in with what Beebe termed an “11th-hour” offer.

There may be a next time, and maybe there’ll be more local governmental support for our neighbor state then — especially since Governor Beebe made it clear that he is ratcheting up Arkansas’ contributions to the maintenance of The Med.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Paranoia Strikes Deep

Indulge me in a little paranoia, if you will.

This week, the Bush administration announced it was creating a new plan for dealing with a catastrophic emergency in the U.S. It gives the president broad authority to take over disaster recovery from state officials and empowers federal authorities to provide “appropriate support” to the vice president to orchestrate post-attack recovery.

Details of the plan have not been released, of course. That would mean the American people would have some idea of just how far-reaching this directive is. And we can’t have that, now can we? Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the White House rejected his request to review the secret portions of the plan. Of course. That would allow our elected representatives to have some idea of just how far-reaching this plan is. We can’t have that, now can we?

This administration has a clear track record of flouting the law, whether it’s breaking the Geneva Conventions, outing a CIA agent, manipulating military intelligence, abusing presidential “signing statements,” firing U.S. attorneys without due cause and lying about it, or ignoring subpoenas from Congress.

They’ve done their utmost to create an imperial presidency, claiming powers for our chief executive that were never intended by our Founding Fathers. The question I keep asking myself is, Why? Sure, in the short term, it allows them to get away with almost anything, but looking down the road to, say, a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama presidency, you would think they would quake at the very idea of such powers in Democratic hands.

Unless they know something we don’t. And, I admit, this is where paranoia strikes deep. The entire Bush presidency is based on the fallout from 9/11. In the aftermath of that tragedy, the administration began accumulating its power, and it hasn’t stopped. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said recently he had a “hunch” we’d be attacked again.

I have a hunch that if such a thing happens, we’d better be prepared to defend our republic — from every direction.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: KHZ | dreamstime.com

If I were an American soldier in Iraq, I’d be tempted mightily to say, “Good luck and goodbye,” and then start for home. I can’t see losing even one more soldier in a war over a country in which 99.9 percent of the American people have no interest.

Iraq had no effect on the American people before President Bush’s illegal invasion of it. It has no effect on us now, unless you have loved ones being fed into the meat grinder that is making futility sausage. What possible difference does it make to us who rules Iraq?

As a matter of fact, we should not only pull all of our troops out of Iraq but also withdraw them from Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and anywhere else they happen to be in the Middle East. If our leaders had the brains to do this, they would discover that the people in that part of the world are quite capable of running their own affairs.

Some of them might kill each other, but eventually things would settle down. It is, after all, one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In the meantime, no one in that part of the world could use us as an excuse for doing anything, and it wouldn’t be Americans who are getting killed.

I would also pull out of Afghanistan and say to the government, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, you fellows work this out among yourselves, because frankly we don’t give a damn. Your hardscrabble country isn’t worth 10 bucks, much less the billions we’ve spent on it. If you need water, dig a well; if you need food, grow it. Goodbye and good luck.

The American people have been conned into accepting the idea of an empire, when there is no need for one. Wherever there is oil, it will be available for sale because it is otherwise worthless, and why should we care from whom we buy it? Some of the worst people in the world are sitting on big oil reserves, and you know what? Their oil burns just as well as anybody else’s.

The imperialists have created the illusion that we are in control of the world and if we weren’t, everything would fall apart. That’s not true. First of all, we are not in control of the world. Secondly, we are not the world’s only remaining superpower. We could not whip China or Russia in an all-out war and probably not even Iran.

It’s true that we have a lot of fancy weapons, but we bought them all on credit, and it won’t be long before our credit will be maxed out. The Chinese have already demonstrated that they can take out satellites, and I’m sure the Russians have that capability too. The problem with relying on high-tech solutions comes when your high tech crashes. Knock out those satellites, and the U.S. will not only be blind but impotent.

Furthermore, we’re trying to be an empire on the cheap. To run an empire, you need lots and lots of cannon fodder. Since we stupidly decided to have an all-volunteer Army, we can’t afford too much cannon fodder. How many of our soldiers could we lose before everyone started screaming “stop the war”? We’ve lost a little over 3,500 troops in Iraq so far, and pressure is starting to build.

What the knuckleheads in Washington have created is an empire of delusions and illusions. It’s time for the nation to wake up and adopt a realistic foreign policy, which is trade and friendly relations with anybody who wants it. As for those who don’t, we simply ignore them. We don’t need to be anybody’s enemy.

As for defense, defending our space is easy and cheap. As another mark of imperial stupidity, the rulers of the empire can’t even do that while they fail overseas.

Charley Reese writes for the Lew Rockwell syndicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson

General David Petraeus, touted by the Bush administration as the potential savior of the Iraq debacle, is like a lot of officers these days: a four-star general with relatively little combat experience. He led the 101st Airborne Division during the initial invasion of Iraq and later was posted with it in the Kurdish area — by far the most peaceful area in Iraq. Other than that, his experience has all been peacetime duty, with a lot of that as an aide to various officers.

No doubt about it, Petraeus is a bright man. Courtesy of the taxpayers, he holds a master’s degree and also a doctorate from prestigious universities. He graduated from West Point. Lately, the press has credited him as the author of the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency. Actually, he co-authored it with Marine Lt. Gen. James Mattis.

Furthermore, Petraeus is unlucky. During a live-fire exercise, one of his soldiers tripped and accidentally shot Petraeus in the chest. Later, while sky diving, his parachute tangled, and he broke his pelvis. His other Iraq assignment was to reorganize and train the Iraqi army. Obviously, he didn’t do such a hot job, because three years later, it is still unable to defend the country.

Now as the top field commander, he’s in charge of what the Bush administration calls a “new strategy.” This consists of posting Americans with Iraqis in various little outposts around Baghdad. The idea is to provide security for what the Army calls the “good guys.” Problem is, to qualify as a good guy, you have to rat out your neighbors. Other Iraqis see these good guys as just traitors and collaborators.

Insurgents, as has been the case historically, will simply go underground while American forces are around and will cause mischief in other places. So when you hear Petraeus or the Bush administration brag about the surge strategy working, just remember the one question they’ve never answered is: “What happens when the U.S. forces leave?” The other unanswered question is: “How long do you intend to keep combat soldiers in Baghdad?”

In short, Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy is the same one we used in Vietnam, where it failed miserably. The only counterinsurgency campaign that I can recall being successful was one carried out by the British in Malaysia. That took about 10 years, and the British were aided by the fact that most of the insurgents were Chinese, who were not especially liked by the other citizens.

The insurgents in Iraq are mainly Iraqis. We are viewed as a foreign occupational army. The Iraqis want us out. Every time our guys kick in a door, shoot somebody, or arrest a “suspect,” we simply create more enemies. Polls taken by the University of Maryland consistently show that regardless of what sectarian or ethnic group is polled, a majority wants us out.

Interestingly enough, 144 members of the Iraqi parliament signed a petition demanding that the U.S. set a timetable for withdrawal. For some reason, American news organizations paid little attention to it. The man who made the announcement said that it will be presented to the speaker and then will be put up for a vote.

It also appears that conflict, at least within the parliament, is not between Shiites and Sunnis but between separatists, backed by the U.S., and nationalists, who want a strong central government in charge of Iraq’s plentiful oil supply. The separatists want us to stay, of course, while the nationalists want us out.

We should back the nationalists and get out.

Charley Reese writes for the Lew Rockwell sydicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic

A few reminders: Iraq is not our country. Our
invasion and occupation are illegal, being in violation of both
international law and our own traditions. We were lied into war. We are still being lied to. Both the Bush administration and the Democrats intend to maintain American troops in Iraq indefinitely.

The catchy little phrase “If you break it, you own it” might apply to unpurchased merchandise, but it definitely does not apply to nation-states. You don’t gain title to your neighbor’s house just because you blow it up. We definitely broke Iraq, but that only gives us the burden of sin. It does not entitle us to the country.

It’s easy to forget that when you listen to American politicians in both parties talk about what Iraq has to do or ought to do or should do. The Iraqi government does not have to do anything we tell it, and so far it hasn’t, despite promises to the contrary.

The phrase now being heard most often around Baghdad is “Iraq is finished.” That’s according to Pepe Escobar, a correspondent for Asia Times Online. I urgently recommend his piece “Baghdad: Up Close and Personal.” He and two Iraqi journalists toured the “Red Zone,” which is all of Baghdad except the heavily fortified Green Zone. Compare what he saw and heard with what you hear from the talking heads in Washington.

And, by the way, they traveled in a plain car without armored vehicles, troops, and helicopters hovering overhead, which is how American big shots travel. They got shot at and arrested but otherwise survived.

We need to get out of Iraq right now. This folly has already cost us 3,300 American lives, $500 billion in tax money, 30,000 wounded, and there is not so much as a faint glow at the end of the tunnel.

The reason I say both Democrats and Republicans intend a long-term military presence is because that’s what they say if you listen closely. The so-called withdrawal deadline of the Democrats stipulates some troops left in country. To quell an insurgency, if you can do it at all, usually requires about 10 years.

You can see by the casualty figures — overwhelmingly Iraqi — that we are not doing the main fighting. We lose people daily but so far in the single digits. And we will go on losing people no matter what tactics we employ as long as we stay there while the Iraqis fight a civil war. We can, with our sick devotion to legalese, say it is not an occupation, but the Iraqis call it an occupation, and they don’t like it worth a toot.

When American politicians say that if we leave, there will be chaos, it’s a joke. There is chaos there now. Another joke is that we can democratize the Middle East. Still another joke is the belief that we can deal with terrorism without solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

If I thought the people in Washington were smart enough, I’d say we intended to destroy the country and leave it in the wreck it is. I don’t think they’re that smart, though. I think they really believed we could waltz in, topple Saddam Hussein, and waltz out. That’s what happens when you let a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals from universities and think tanks set policy. Only people who have worn muddy boots and heard the sounds of gunfire should be consulted on the issues of war and peace. Such people are darned scarce in Washington these days, even at the Pentagon.

The present policy sins daily against the Iraqi people, wastes the lives of American military people, adds to the financial burden of future generations, and demonstrates to the world that we are a nation led by fools.

Charley Reese writes for King Features. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Democrats Need to Find Courage

“In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday.” — AP

Dear Congressional Democrats,

What is wrong with you people? Have you not read the polls that say more than 70 percent of Americans think we’re screwing up in Iraq? Have you not noticed that the president’s approval rating is hovering somewhere between horrific and really, really crappy? Do you just lack cojones (that loosely translates as “courage,” for those of you who don’t like anything Hispanic), or are you suffering from some sort of collective battered-wife syndrome?

Assuming it’s the latter, let this serve as a sort of editorial intervention: Your “man” is no good. He lies to you about everything, including this war you continue to allow him to wage on our behalf.

He spies on you and doesn’t tell you about it. He’s even tried to make the Justice Department a wing of the Republican Party. When you pass legislation, he signs it, then adds a cute little “signing statement” that says he’ll ignore whatever part of the law he feels like ignoring.

All your friends around the world see what he’s doing to you and to our reputation as a country. Our soldiers (our figurative children) are dying daily, and you’re doing nothing. You have become enablers in the greatest foreign-policy mistake in American history.

Oh sure, I know he says he’ll keep you “safe” and that he’s keeping the terrorists at bay by fighting them overseas so they won’t “follow us home.” And maybe you’re afraid that the American people still believe that fairy tale. Some do, but most of us have figured out that the terrorists are already here, rejoicing in the fact that our troops and our money are tied up in a civil war thousands of miles away.

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you the truth, but it’s for your own good. Your man is a cheat and liar. Dump him.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Permanent Half-Mast

I was traveling last week, and everywhere I went, American flags were flying at half-mast in response to President Bush’s order to lower the flag in honor of the deaths of 32 students at Virginia Tech University.

In the airports, television screens endlessly replayed video footage of the mass murderer’s “explanation” for his senseless rampage. People watched, shook their heads, and went back to their magazines or paperbacks.

President Bush’s order got a somewhat different response from an Army sergeant named Jim Wilt, who is stationed in Afghanistan. “I find it ironic,” Wilt wrote, “that the flags were flown at half-staff for the young men and women who were killed at VT, yet it is never lowered for the death of a U.S. service member.”

He noted that his post in Bagram obeyed the president’s order even though the flag is not lowered for members of his unit who are killed in combat. He reasoned that it was because “it is a daily occurrence these days to see X number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan scrolling across the ticker at the bottom of the TV screen.”

Which is true. On the day of the VT massacre, the names of six U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq scrolled across our televisions. You know nothing about these men and women, and neither do I. The only thing we do know is that they died in service to the flag that was flying at half-mast for 32 dead students — whose names and photos were published in most newspapers around the country.

I think lowering the flag for the students was the right action for the president to take. But I find it ironic that he can go to a memorial service for fallen students yet not find the time to attend the funeral of a single soldier who has died in the horrific fiasco he and his minions have created in Iraq.

I understand the impracticality of lowering the flag for each of the 3,700 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we did so, it would be permanently at half-mast.

Which, come to think of it, is probably appropriate these days.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Iraqis and Americans alike were stunned by the audacity of Senator John McCain’s heavily publicized (and heavily armed) excursion through Baghdad’s Shorja market last weekend. There was the leading proponent of the war on Capitol Hill, setting out to confirm his recent claim that the escalation of U.S. forces is greatly improving conditions on the ground, accompanied by a handful of congressional colleagues. He seemed to think nobody would notice that their little shopping trip also included a platoon of soldiers, three Black Hawk choppers, and two Apache gunships.

Neither the Iraqi merchants used as props in this strange exercise nor the American voters who were its intended targets could possibly have been deceived by such a charade. So the question that inevitably arises is whether McCain & Co. are still attempting to dupe us — or whether they have finally duped themselves.

Consider the happy talk from Representative Mike Pence, an ultraconservative Indiana Republican who has visited Iraq on several occasions. At the press conference that inevitably followed the Shorja photo op, Pence said he had been inspired by the opportunity to “mix and mingle unfettered among ordinary Iraqis,” drinking tea and haggling over carpets. To him, the Baghdad shops were “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.” Senator Lindsey Graham, another McCain sidekick, boasted of buying “five rugs for five bucks,” marveling that “just a few weeks ago, hundreds of people, dozens of people were killed in the same place.”

Then they climbed back into the armored vehicles that served as their tourist buses and returned to the Green Zone.

Aside from the theatrics of the Shorja excursion, however, the message delivered by McCain, Graham, and Pence was scarcely different from what each of them usually says after visiting Iraq. In February 2005, for instance, when McCain made his famous trip with Senator Hillary Clinton, he claimed to believe that “the dynamic [of the war] has changed from Iraqi insurgents versus the U.S. … to Iraqi insurgents versus the Iraqi government.” Back then, he declared himself “far more optimistic” than he had previously felt, adding: “I think we have an opportunity to succeed.”

According to McCain, there is always an opportunity to succeed, provided that we are willing to sacrifice more young Americans and hundreds of billions more dollars. But then again, this is a man who thinks we didn’t expend enough lives and dollars in Vietnam — although he would be hard-pressed to explain why the world would be better today if 100,000 Americans and another million Vietnamese had died in that war.

As for Pence, the only conceivable purpose of his latest trip was to pick up those rugs. His sunny comments were as predictable this time as when he visited Iraq in September 2005, when he told The Indianapolis Star that spending two days there had convinced him the United States was “winning the war.” General John Abizaid, then the commander of U.S. forces, had assured him there was a viable plan and that the plan was working, all of which Pence dutifully repeated to the folks back home.

On this trip, none of these jolly politicians mentioned the rise in killings across Iraq during the past month. None of them even seemed aware that the temporary reduction of violence in Baghdad appears to have driven even greater carnage outside the capital — such as the bombing in Kirkuk that slaughtered a group of schoolgirls the same day that Graham and Pence got their bargain carpets.

Even if the “surge” succeeds in suppressing violence in Baghdad for a few weeks or months by pouring in tens of thousands of American troops, what would that mean? Do McCain and his colleagues actually believe that we can somehow provide enough soldiers and Marines to achieve the pacification of every city and town in Iraq? If so, how long would our troops be expected to police the terrorist incidents and revenge attacks that now occur every day in this civil war?

Congressional hawks like McCain echo President Bush’s complaint that the Democrats are undermining the war by seeking to set a date for an American withdrawal. They insist that the war’s critics should simply shut up and send more money and more soldiers while we see whether this “plan” works better than the previously discarded plans.

But the truth is that the president and his echoes are merely playing for time with American lives. They have no plan because there is no military solution to this war. The war propaganda doesn’t work any better than the war plan — which is why the Democrats have been emboldened and why McCain’s presidential prospects are rapidly declining.

Joe Conason writes for Salon and The New York Observer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

“Making Progress”

The media spectacle that Arizona senator John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on April 1st was simply another reprise of an old and ghastly ritual. McCain expressed “very cautious optimism” and told reporters that the latest version of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is “making progress.”

Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor informed journalists: “We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.” Nine days later, President George W. Bush declared: “It’s not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable.”

For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring.

When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time in May 1962, he came back saying that he’d seen “nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future.”

In October 1966, when McNamara held a press conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from another trip to Vietnam, he spoke of the progress he’d seen there. Then-military analyst Daniel Ellsberg recalls that McNamara made that presentation “minutes after telling me that everything was much worse than the year before.”

Despite the recent “surge” in the kind of media hype that McCain was trying to boost in Baghdad, this spring has begun with most news coverage still indicating that the war is going badly for American forces in Iraq. Some pundits say that U.S. military fortunes there during the next few months will determine the war’s political future in Washington. And opponents of the war often focus their arguments on evidence that an American victory is not possible.

But shifts in the U.S. military role on the ground in Iraq, coupled with the Pentagon’s air war escalating largely out of media sight, could enable the war’s promoters to claim a notable reduction of “violence.” And the American death toll could fall due to reconfiguration or reduction of U.S. troop levels inside Iraq.

Such a combination of developments would appeal to the fervent nationalism of U.S. news media. But the antiwar movement shouldn’t pander to jingo-narcissism. If we argue that the war is bad mainly because of what it is doing to Americans, then what happens when the Pentagon finds ways to cut American losses — while continuing to inflict massive destruction on Iraqi people?

American news outlets will be inclined to depict the Iraq war as winding down when fewer Americans are dying in it. That happened during the last several years of the Vietnam War, while massive U.S. bombing — and Vietnamese deaths — continued unabated.

The vast bulk of the U.S. media is in the habit of defining events around the world largely in terms of what’s good for the U.S. government — through the eyes of top officials in Washington. Routinely, the real lives of people are noted only as shorthand for American agendas. The political spin of the moment keeps obscuring the human element.

Awakening from a 40-year nap, an observer might wonder how much has changed since the last war that the United States stumbled over because it could not win. The Congressional Record is filled with insistence that the lessons of Vietnam must not be forgotten. But they cannot be truly remembered if they were never learned in the first place.

Norman Solomon’s latest book is War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Someday, historians will wonder why the highest officials in the Bush Justice Department believed that they could inflict heavy-handed political abuse on federal prosecutors and get away with it. The punishment of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys betrays a strong sense of impunity in the White House, as if the president and his aides assumed that nobody would complain about these outrages or attempt to hold them accountable.The precedent for this misconduct was set long ago.

There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush.

The cautionary tale of Chuck Banks begins during the summer of 1992, as the presidential contest entered its final months with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

At the time, Banks had already served for five years as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. As an active Republican who had run for Congress and still aspired to higher office, he counted Clinton among his political adversaries. The first President Bush had recently selected him as a potential nominee for the federal bench. Nothing could have better served Banks’ personal interests than a chance to stop the Clintons and preserve the Bush presidency.

In September 1992, Republican activist L. Jean Lewis, who was employed by the Resolution Trust Corporation, provided that opportunity by fabricating a criminal referral naming the Clintons as witnesses in a case against the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association (the small Arkansas savings and loan owned by Whitewater partner and Clinton friend James McDougal).

The referral prepared by Lewis lacked merit — as determined by both Banks and the top FBI agent in his office — but Lewis commenced a persistent crusade for action against the hated Clintons. The FBI and the U.S. attorney repeatedly rejected or ignored her crankish entreaties.

Eventually, however, officials in the Bush White House and the Justice Department heard whispers about the Lewis referral. Obviously, that document had the potential to save the president from defeat in November by smearing the Clintons as corrupt participants in a sweetheart land deal.

That fall, Edith Holiday, secretary to the Bush cabinet, asked Attorney General William Barr whether he knew anything about such a referral. Although Barr knew nothing, he quickly sent an inquiry to the FBI. Weeks later, the president’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, posed a similar improper question to a top Resolution Trust Corp. official.

The queries and hints from above created intense pressure on Banks to act on the Lewis referral despite his opinion, shared by the FBI, that her work was sloppy and biased. After Barr ordered him to act on the referral no later than two weeks before Election Day, he replied with a roar of conscience.

“I know that in investigations of this type,” he wrote in a remarkable memo to his boss, “the first steps, such as issuance of … subpoenas … will lead to media and public inquiries of matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven’ …

“I must opine that after such a lapse of time, the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election. … For me personally to participate in an investigation that I know will or could easily lead to the above scenario … is inappropriate. I believe it amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”

The Whitewater case didn’t save the first President Bush, but it was later revived as a pseudo-scandal. More pertinent today is what happened to Banks and Lewis — and the U.S. attorney’s office in Little Rock.

Banks forfeited his promised judgeship and returned to private practice with his political career ended. The incompetent Lewis appeared before the Senate Whitewater Committee, where she lied repeatedly before “fainting” under examination by the Democratic counsel. She then disappeared from public view until 2003, when the White House rewarded her with an important federal job. Those who had observed Lewis in action were astonished when she was named chief of staff to the Pentagon Inspector General, at a salary of $118,000 a year.

An ugly sequel occurred in December, when the Justice Department ousted H.E. (Bud) Cummins III — another upstanding and competent Republican prosecutor in Little Rock — so that a crony of Karl Rove could replace him in the U.S. attorney’s office.

Was this what George W. Bush meant when he promised to return “honor” and “integrity” to the Oval Office?

Joe Conason writes for Salon and The New York Observer.