Chapter 2: McCain and Clinton

2010 - 2011

For the next couple of years, things went relatively smoothly. I didn’t have to provide much more than routine guidance in Washington. John had a compliant Congress after both the 2008 and 2010 elections, and he got most of what he wanted from them. He really did turn out to be a third term of the Buckman administration. The American Renaissance Initiative, Adrianopolis/Stouffer, and The American Impact Project all worked together to push a moderate Republican agenda, and Brewster McRiley ran the Republican National Committee with an eye to keeping the crazies under control. We had a few good years there.

On a personal note, I was able to learn what had soured Holly on Jerry. They were both graduating that summer with their doctorates and were heading in totally different directions. Jerry was headed to Corvallis, Oregon, to take a position at Oregon State. Holly, however, had landed a very prestigious post-doctoral slot at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. The initials stood for an earlier name, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, one of the premier physics research institutes in the world. We were very proud of our girl, even if we didn’t have a clue what she was talking about most of the time. She had a doctorate in physics, with a specialty in quantum cosmology, and was going to be working on a project searching for ‘dark matter.’ I’m a bright guy, with a PhD of my own in math, and I couldn’t begin to fathom half of what she talked about. In any case, the two of them were on opposite sides of the planet, and Jerry was somewhat jealous of her; CERN was considerably further up the scientific food chain than Oregon State.

We promised to visit her regularly. This wasn’t out of the question since we could fly through going to or from the Middle East. After she settled in, the rest of the family would visit for a nice vacation in Switzerland.

Overseas I basically tried to keep a lid on things for John. I have to admit that I was more than a little proprietary towards Kurdistan. I felt like it was my baby and wanted to see it grow up right. This wasn’t always easy. Most of the Middle Eastern countries considered diplomacy a zero-sum game; the only way to be strong was to make everybody else weak. The more Western concept of a non-zero-sum game wasn’t something they bought into, where if everybody was strong and stable it made you strong and stable, too.

As a result, several of the Kurd’s neighbors tried to keep them weak and divided. In this they were helped by the Kurds themselves, who had two main subgroups centered on the Barzani and Talabani families, who have not always gotten along. These two families/clans/tribes formed the basis for the two main political groups in the country, and over the years, most of the neighboring countries had provided money and arms to one group or the other (or even both) to get them to fight each other. A lot of this was settled following the 1991 Gulf War and the 2006 Kurdish War, but the issue still came up. Iraq was still weak and was orienting its military against their traditional enemy to the East, the Iranians. They had zero chance of moving north while America backed up the Kurds. Likewise, the Turks were beginning to get it through their thick skulls that it made better sense to play nice with the Kurds and enjoy the oil business. Since the peace treaty had been signed, terrorist activity had dropped to almost non-existent levels, and was being treated as a police matter, not a military problem. On the other hand, both the Syrians and the Iranians wanted to make mischief, both to weaken the Kurds and attempt to goad America into doing something stupid. One of my big jobs was simply to keep the good guys playing nice and the bad guys informed that we knew what they were up to and could happily return the favor.

On the plus side, despite whatever internal problems the Kurds were having, in general conditions were improving remarkably. Money was flowing in from oil profits and while some was siphoned off in graft, most went to the national treasury for use in building a country and an economy. One of the more interesting effects was on the Kurds in neighboring countries. Most of the Kurds in Iraq had already become part of Kurdistan, either because their lands became part of the new country or because they beat feet after the war. The Kurds in Turkey were also behaving. The Kurds in Iran and Syria, however, began immigrating to the new republic. The borders for most of these countries were very porous, and while there were local dialects and fashion differences, it wasn’t all that hard to tell who was a Kurd and who wasn’t. Life was better in Kurdistan for many Kurds, and they began moving in. In general, this was relatively popular, although there were some growing pains, and I assisted with some humanitarian aid for refugees and immigrants. If the newcomers became productive citizens, their fellow Kurds were willing to cut them a fair bit of slack.

The American presence in Kurdistan was known formally as the Kurdistan Military Assistance Command, or K-MAC for short. The combat component of this was the 47^th Composite Brigade and formed the bulk of the troops and was commanded by a colonel. However, there were other elements around, as well, several training schools and repair depots, and the whole kit and caboodle was under a brigadier general. One interesting result of my week with the Rangers was that this was extensively reported in Al Jazeera and in the Kurdish press. The 47^th would routinely ask me to join them in morning physical training, and after a bit, the Kurds did so as well. Meanwhile I was slowly learning Kurdish, as were quite a few of the American troops. I don’t think I ever learned much more than about a hundred words, but that was enough to do a fair bit. It’s always useful to know how to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ in the local language.

In some cases, I had to be a hard ass to our allies. Our biggest ally in the Middle East was Israel, of course, followed by fellow NATO member Turkey, both democracies. In the summer of 2010, some Turkish and Palestinian aid organizations decided to send a ‘Freedom Flotilla’ with supplies to face down and break the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip. I learned about this from the Turkish government who didn’t want to stop the ships because of internal Turkish politics, and didn’t want to piss off the Israelis, who they were relatively peaceful with. I went way above and beyond my authority and demanded that the Turks fly me out to the flotilla on a helicopter to act as a negotiator. There was only one ship that really didn’t want me on board, the Mavi Marmora, and that made me more suspicious, so that was the ship I had the Turks land me on.

Things got very tense at that point. Unsurprisingly, some of the Palestinians on board were quite radical and wanted a confrontation, either with the Israelis or with the Turks. The Turks on the ships wanted no confrontations whatsoever, and they let me land. I was still arguing with the Palestinians when the Israelis showed up and boarded the ships, and I found myself in between the two groups. The Israelis didn’t want an American diplomat anywhere near this clusterfuck. Meanwhile, my Secret Service agents were going nuts because everybody was pointing guns at everybody else, and especially at me! At least those guys I could order to holster their stuff, simply because if anybody started firing, we would have a bloodbath regardless.

The other ships in the fleet were taken under Israeli control, but the Mavi Marmora was holding out. The Turks were swearing six ways from Sunday that nothing had been loaded on the ships without Turkish inspection, and everything was peaceful, food and construction supplies. The Israelis, in turn, demanded that everything in the ships was contraband and wanted to inspect everything for hidden weapons. I just tried to keep everybody from opening fire. The one thing that nobody had predicted was that the ex-American President would get into this; shooting me was a good way to truly piss off the United States, and even the rabid Israeli lobby back home in the States couldn’t paper over a debacle like that!

After two days at sea, a compromise was reached. American Marines and SEALs from the American carrier group which had sailed up would inspect the ships, one by one, with an Israeli officer present. As each ship was cleared for any weapons, it would proceed to Gaza. All the passengers on board would be taken into custody by the Israelis, who would deport them to Turkey; nobody would be jailed or tortured. The ships would be unloaded and then be turned over to the Israelis. Nobody would get shot. If anything was dumped over the side prior to the inspection, a blind eye would be turned on the affair. Nobody really liked this since the Israelis wanted a steel wall to be built around Gaza and the Palestinians wanted an armed confrontation with Israeli ‘terrorist’ soldiers. I even heard from John McCain that I was overstepping my bounds, and afterwards he yanked me back to D.C. for a very thorough ass-chewing. I was also dis-invited from any future visits to Tel Aviv. Fox News branded me a traitor, and the Israeli lobby wanted me dismissed and censured.

On the plus side, nobody got shot, though some people on the other ships got knocked around or tased or hit with beanbags. I kept reminding everybody that we didn’t need two of our most important allies in the region to start a shooting war. The Turks breathed a sigh of relief and promised to try and keep the idiots under control a little better in the future. I resumed my regular trips around the region, sidestepping Israel.

One thing I did was spend some time in Kurdistan with the Peshmerga. In 2006 they had been almost exclusively an infantry force, and they mostly still were, but things had improved, too. During the Kurdish War a vast amount of Iraqi equipment was captured, including a lot of vehicles. Not everything got shot up or blown away. In some cases, tanks and trucks were simply rendered incapable of fighting or moving and could be repaired. As part of our military assistance, we set up a repair and maintenance depot outside of Erbil and rebuilt an awful lot of Russian trucks. This converted the Peshmerga from a leg infantry outfit to motorized infantry, which made them much more powerful. Motorization meant more than just being able to drive around faster than walking; it meant they could carry more supplies and ammunition, and more heavy crew-served weapons. They were still a small army compared to some of their neighbors, but they were a lot stronger than they looked on paper.

Likewise, there were enough tanks captured, about fifty, to allow the Kurds to form an armored battalion. They also had enough captured or rebuilt BMPs and BRDMs to outfit a couple of mechanized infantry battalions. For artillery, they junked most of the Russian supplied arty that was captured, and the U.S. provided the equivalent of a battalion of 105s. The American army had mostly transitioned to the M119 105 mm howitzer, freeing up almost a thousand of the venerable M102s that I was so familiar with. Those M102s were very accurate and very reliable and very serviceable - and very cheap! They were perfect for the Peshmerga. I made sure that I met with all of these battalions on my visits and was able to talk to the battalion and battery commanders on an equal basis. The US Army assigned advisers to quite a few Peshmerga units to assist in training and coordinating movements with the 47^th Brigade.

Back home, my offspring decided to be fruitful and multiply. Molly and Bucky had a son during the summer of 2011, and they named him Carter Henry, a name which was nicely sentimental, and required us to explain the significance to Megan. A few months later Megan and Charlie had their own first child, a little girl they named Ashley Elizabeth. Marilyn was simply in seventh heaven and became a bit of a nuisance to the kids as she bounced between the families being granny. We had both agreed that there wouldn’t be any of that Nana and Pop-Pop nonsense; we would be Granny and Gramps and would be as grumpy and curmudgeonly as we wanted to be.

Other news wasn’t so good. Marilyn’s parents both died in 2011 from cancer like they had before. I was able to get them topflight care, but it didn’t matter. Marilyn’s sisters squabbled as much as before, and Harriet would always listen to the last one she talked to, and she was diagnosed too far along to make a change. She died in January of 2011, and Big Bob passed in November, as much from loneliness as from the cancer. We knew it was happening, but it didn’t mean my wife didn’t grieve with the rest of the family.

One truly heartbreaking event occurred in October. Stormy passed away of a bad heart while Marilyn and I were both in Kurdistan. She had been staying with Molly and Bucky, and they found her in the morning. We couldn’t even be there with her at the end. We both cried, but I couldn’t leave and fly right home. She had been with us from the 2000 campaign on and was as much a part of my Presidency as my wife or children. I didn’t know what it would be like without her.

Maybe I’m just a cynic, but in my opinion most of us aren’t going to heaven. I’ve never met a dog, though, who wasn’t.

2012

The last couple of years had been relatively quiet, though I had personally been busy. The 2010 mid-term elections came and went without much change; the Dems picked up a handful of seats in the House, but nothing new in the Senate. The result was a slim but significant Republican lead in the House and a slim but significant Democratic lead in the Senate. John was still able to get things accomplished. Meanwhile the Democrats began warming up for 2012, and it became obvious that my earlier prediction that it would be a repeat of 2008 was looking spot on. The two leading Democratic candidates were going to be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, déjà vu all over again.

Unfortunately, whoever the Democratic primary winner was, they were probably going to win the general election in the fall of 2012. In late 2011 the economy went into recession. It wasn’t anywhere near the level of the Great Recession, more of a regular recession, but nobody enjoys them anyway. We had managed to deflate the housing bubble enough to keep the economy from collapsing, but a bad economy never favors the incumbent. John had squeaked out a victory over Obama, but it would be even trickier to do against Clinton in a recession. Both Obama and Clinton were already railing that this was what happened when you let billionaires run the country! (Okay, I was a billionaire, but John wasn’t. His wife had the money in that family, and she was in the $100 million range, which is very nice but not a billionaire. The Democrats were relying on the fact that the average American can’t tell the difference between millions, billions, and trillions.)

Otherwise, the rest of the world muddled on. By the tail end of 2011 there began to be a lot of unrest throughout the Arab world. It started in Tunisia, where a woman complaining about how the police were treating her husband was arrested and taken to the local police headquarters. She was then gang raped by the police and returned to her husband with the instruction that this was what happened when peasants didn’t behave. Public outrage began to grow, and by the end of December Tunisia was in a state of semi-revolt. I knew that this was going to be the start of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember when that had happened on my first go. Was it before or later? I remembered that it happened on Obama’s watch, and he hadn’t had a notably successful foreign policy about this. I just hoped John would do better. I was still getting the Presidential Daily Brief, so I was able to follow it closely.

As we moved into 2012, the world began to get messier. The ‘Tunisian problem’ began to spread, first to Libya and then on to Egypt. By the spring, Tunisia was in complete revolt, and the President/Dictator, Zine Ben Ali was scrambling to find a new home. Next to go was Libya, in mid-January, followed a week later by Egypt, where both countries began to experience large-scale street riots. The responses were different in both cases. In Libya, Muhammar Kaddafi sent his army after the protesters, which sparked a full-scale civil war. In Egypt, the Army refused to fight the protesters, and Hosni Mubarak turned his police loose on them instead. From North Africa it spread like wildfire. Yemen was the next to melt down, and things spread to Syria and some of the Gulf States after that.

What caused all the unrest all at the same time? There were all sorts of reasons, and each country had their own problems. Was it the rampant corruption in command economies? Tribal jealousies? An uprising against dictatorships? A demand by the ‘Arab Street’ for a say in their own affairs? Religious upheaval? Yes, no, and all of the above. Religion played a big role in Egypt, as the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood took on the secular Army and Mubarak. In Tunisia and Libya, it seemed mostly people rising up against corruption and a heavy-handed government. Yemen added in the traditional enmity between North Yemen and South Yemen and tossed Sunni and Shiite tradition into the mix. Bahrain had a lot of religious overtones, and Syria had religious issues, terrorist problems, and tribal elements.

Not every Islamic country had these issues. Morocco was morphing into a constitutional monarchy, as was Jordan, and Turkey was a democracy, and these countries weathered the storm fine. Kurdistan wasn’t affected either. It seemed that a certain degree of freedom and elective government and a decent economy quieted the problems right down.

Elsewhere, there were massive calls for President McCain to do something. What that was depended on the party. I was on the phone daily with him when I was overseas, and usually flew home to meet directly with him and his National Security Council. I didn’t get involved in North Africa but did talk to the Saudis and acted as a relay as needed. The Saudis were going batshit over the possibility their country could be next.

The governments in Bahrain and Yemen reacted brutally and efficiently and stopped the chaos before it got completely out of control. The Egyptian military threw Mubarak to the wolves and allowed elections, which settled them down. Tunisia sorted itself out and was too small for anybody to really care. Only Libya and Syria proved to be problems, and they became major problems indeed.

Libya proved somewhat more tractable. The essential geography of the nation lent itself to that. The country has 1,100 miles of northern coastline, and ninety percent of the population lives within an easy drive of the coast. Military operations basically run back and forth along the coast and the highway network there, and the few big cities on the coast. Militarily, the Libyan military was ludicrously weak for such a large and gaudy force, but they were sufficiently strong to be able to kill a lot of civilians. On the other hand, lots of military units rebelled against Kaddafi and joined the rebels.

In March I flew home from Kurdistan by way of Rome, Paris, and London, and spoke to their leaders about their views on Libya, and then flew home to Washington. I spoke with John, and then the next day was invited to a meeting at the Pentagon with the National Security Council as well as a few other diplomats and Special Envoys. The reason for the emergency meeting was the rapidly developing counterattack by the Libyan army against rebel forces, and intercepted communications indicating that civilian casualties were not to be considered a barrier to operations. Kaddafi was planning to kill them all and let Allah sort them out. The United Nations was meeting to discuss a formal protest or resolution. The theory around the White House was that if they could get some form of legal cover that would free them up to intervene.

The form of intervention was under discussion. The one thing that I stressed, along with others making the same point, was that we wanted to avoid ‘boots on the ground.’ Kurdistan was the exception that made the rule about the Muslims hating America more than each other. That limited us to air and missile strikes, which was something that our NATO allies would be willing to cooperate with. There were a lot of nods around the table.

I turned to the Navy admiral who seemed to be in charge of the proposal, and said, “Admiral, have we made provisions for when somebody gets shot down?”

“That has been factored in, sir.”

Which really didn’t answer my question. I smiled and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Admiral, but I once spent a week behind enemy lines, and the President here spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton. If we do this and have planes doing close support or CAP, the odds are somebody is going to have a very bad day. Could you be more specific?”

He nodded and motioned to an aide, and a series of slides came onto a screen, detailing the helo support and Special Ops teams available for combat search and rescue. I thanked him and John must have figured this was adequate. He turned to Condi Rice and had her confirm with her counterparts in Europe that this plan would be acceptable, and that they needed to speak to the Pentagon about their plans. No action would be taken until the U.N. vote but would begin shortly after that if approved.

March 15, the Ides of March, the vote came back from the United Nations on a Security Council Resolution, condemning the violence and ordering a ceasefire. It also authorized a no-fly zone, an embargo and economic sanctions against Kaddafi, and authorized military actions to enforce the ceasefire and no-fly zone. At dawn two days later over 100 missiles were launched by us and the Brits, and Coalition fighters and bombers followed up to destroy ground facilities, air bases, and perform close air support as needed. As I suspected, a couple of planes went down. A British Tornado was hit by ground fire near Tripoli and managed to make it back over the Med before the crew punched out; they were picked up by a Navy helo. An American F-18 managed to eat a flock of seagulls near Benghazi right after finishing their bomb run, and that crew bailed out over land. They were found by Navy SEALs having a delightful meal with the rebels, who hailed them as heroes and tended their injuries. The locals invited the SEALs to dine with them and then provided a ride to their waiting helicopter.

This was all very good and settled Kaddafi’s hash big time. He didn’t survive the summer. It didn’t help John McCain, however. The Democrats had demanded that he do something, but now that he had, they complained about American military adventurism. By that time the Democrats had selected their candidate. As I suspected, this time around it was going to be Hillary. She and Obama fought the primary battle all over again, but enough people figured that he hadn’t won the last time, so maybe they should let her try. She had it sewed up by Super Tuesday and he bowed out, along with any other candidates. It was going to be Hillary Clinton versus John McCain through the fall, and it promised to be bloody and ugly.

The economy was still sluggish through the summer of 2012, and the conventions were in August. I was asked to speak the first night, and Marilyn and I received a standing ovation. It felt very strange going to a political speech without Stormy by our side. In my opinion the convention went well, but it was going to be very difficult. Leaving aside the slowdown of the economy there was a certain tiredness to the nation. After twelve years of Republican administrations, people wanted something new and fresh. The Republican mantra of ‘we’re the grownups and we know what we’re doing’ was getting old. The Democrats were calling for hope and change and new faces, and Hillary was running the slickest, most error-free campaign in modern history.

That’s not to say it was the cleanest campaign. If there was an untruth or falsehood she missed, I couldn’t spot it. My name was dragged through the mud because John and Jeb were part of the Bush-Buckman-McCain triumvirate manipulating the economy. We were all fat cat billionaires ruling the nation for the sake of our personal wallets, and we didn’t care about the little people. (Mind you, some of the biggest donors to the Democrats were the Wall Street banks, which I found more than a little ironic.) We were examples of all that was wrong with America, and if you voted for Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh (Senator and former Governor of Indiana, and the son of Birch Bayh, who had also been an Indiana Senator when I was a boy) you would get youth and fresh ideas. The nation needed to throw the rascals out!