"SUICIDE AND CORRUPTION"

Frank Rich riffs on the widespread corruption endemic to Bush's adventure in Iraq, and concludes that the death of Col. Ted Westhusing wrote coda to the problem.

The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book “Blood Money.” Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s engagement in Iraq as a suicide note.

“I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. “I am sullied.”

I've written about Col. Westhusing's death before. It's a tragic irony that two years later, his warning has not resulted in any change.

A MOSAIC OF CORRUPTION

Frank Rich reflects on Bush administration-related scandals (Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, Bernie Kerik, et al) and concludes that they are part of the same mosaic that has led to the debacle in Iraq:

What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.
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Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It’s no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.

Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war’s endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it’s clear that he’s the one with reason to be afraid.

I don't expect the White House to be bipartisan. But I do expect it to seek to promote the best interests of the nation rather than the personal interests of its cronies. They're paid to do just that. The evil triumvirate of Bush-Cheney-Rove has corrupted almost everything and everyone it touches.

Rich is right in pointing out that the media still doesn't know how to confront or address the administration's record of lies and deceit. I would suggest that it's largely because they're unable to face their own complicity in the situation the nation now faces. Their active cheerleading for the administration and the war, their cozy, insider relationships with Republican power brokers, and their awe of their corporate masters didn't start with 9/11. They actively despised and challenged the Clintons and Gores at every opportunity. I don't care if a sizable majority of the so-called mainstream media acknowledge, as individuals, positions that classify them as "liberals." They are not politicians pursuing those policies; they are employees, people trying to make a lucrative living, and that living depends to a great extent on their access to power. With a few exceptions, the so-called "liberal media" have sold themselves and their "liberal" souls for a fat paycheck and the chance to rub shoulders with the powerful. And that, by definition, is prostitution.

ELIZABETH EDWARDS FOR PRESIDENT

Frank Rich. Allelulia, amen.

The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity, the slick playacting that passes for being “human” and “folksy” in a campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.
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Whatever Mr. Edwards’s flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife’s diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, “Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family.”

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.