O'Neill's revenge

Eighteen months later, O'Neill had become an embarrassment to Bush and had to go.

Paul O'Neill never fit in with the president's tightly controlled team. Indeed, to use a popular American slang expression to describe how Team Bush viewed O'Neill. He was a royal pain in the butt.

That's because, in an administration where loyalty to the party line was valued above all else, O'Neill wasn't afraid to speak his mind and or even publicly contradict the president on a number of issues. During his brief tenure, O'Neill opposed the administration's repudiation of the global warming treaty, its decision to impose tariffs to protect the domestic steel industry and its third round of tax cuts. And that's just for starters.

Of course, there had been disagreement within the Bush administration over policy. Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and their respective fiefdoms, for example, were at odds over how to deal with Saddam. But the bickering was all done in private, with only a few peeps reaching the earshot of inquiring media.

Reporters, on the other hand, knew where Secretary O'Neill stood and it often wasn't behind George Bush, Jr. That lack of team play not only got O'Neill fired but earned him the characterisation of being "a loose cannon."

Now twelve months later, O'Neill, is back, blasting away in his recently published kiss and tell book about his tenure under his former boss. Titled "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill" (Simon and Schuster publishing), the book is co-authored by Ron Suskind and based in large part on 19,000 documents provided by O'Neill, which include memoranda to the president, thank-you notes, meeting minutes and extensive reports.

The picture that O'Neill presents of Team Bush is not flattering. In promoting his book, the former secretary appeared a few weeks ago on the highly popular U.S. television news show, CBS's "60 Minutes." He acknowledged that tax cuts were largely responsible for the economic growth rate of more than eight percent the U.S. experienced in the last quarter of 2003, but he maintains "the growth rate would have been more than six percent anyway. And if Bush hadn't made the tax cuts, the country would have made progress reforming the tax code and social security."

In promulgating ideas like this, O'Neill became the messenger the Bush team didn't want to hear. O'Neill recalls how, believing that a fiscal crisis was looming in the country, he arranged a meeting with Vice President Cheney, an old friend who had brought him into the Bush administration and whom he thought would listen to him. When O'Neill described how the economic data showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy, Cheney cut him off, dismissing his views with a simple "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." The usually loquacious O'Neill went speechless as Cheney added, "We won the midterm. This is our due."

But it's O'Neill's revelations about decision making within the Bush administration that provides the most disconcerting portrait of Team Bush. O'Neill confirms what many of us know: the invasion of Iraq was in the works early in the administration and long before it began warning about the alleged growing threat from Iraq in the days after the terrorist attack of 9-11. As O'Neill puts it: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and he needed to go."

Bush, himself, is portrayed as an alarmingly disengaged head of state who showed little interest in policy decisions. O'Neill told Suskind that in the cabinet meetings he attended, Bush was so disengaged, he was like "a blind man in room of deaf people." Further, Bush was so ambiguous in making policy decisions that administration officials had to act based on "little more than hunches the president might make."

The Bush administration has tried to dismiss O'Neill's book as the rantings of a former disgruntled employee. In response to O'Neill's charge that Bush intended to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime from the first days of his administration, Rumsfeld said: "the administration was simply following the policies of 'regime change' of the Clinton administration." A feeble rationale indeed contradicted by the ample evidence, revealing that the conservative Attilas shaping Bush administration foreign policy have had a long-range plan for a New World Order in place since the George Bush, Sr. presidential administration.

Bush, Jr.'s administration has launched a petty counter attack that involves looking into whether O'Neill broke any laws or bureaucratic regulations in his use of any of the 19,000 documents. Such a move is predictable and certainly designed to distract the public's attention away from O'Neill's revelations.

O'Neill has denied using any classified documents. On a television programme, he said he wanted to inform the public "about a broken political process."

Democratic presidential hopefuls have jumped on O'Neill comments about Bush's leadership. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) who has strongly supported the Iraq War, has said O'Neill's "comments about the president's leadership involvement are really disconcerting. And you know, Paul O'Neill has been a very tough critic of the Bush administration's economic policies from within the administration. It sure looks like that's why he was fired. And he's right. This administration has taken us into the longest fiscal deficit in our history."

Wake up, Joe, and re-read O'Neill's revelations. More importantly, the Bush administration has taken us into the biggest quagmire since the Vietnam War -- the Iraq War. In reading O'Neill's book, it's scary to learn how the Bush administration is reaching decisions that affect the global community.

Ron Chepesiuk is a former Fulbright scholar to Bangladesh, visiting professor in journalism at Chittagong University, and a research associate at the National Defence College in Dhaka.