(HOST) As President Bush prepares to change direction in Iraq, commentator Bill Seamans considers other changes we’re likely to see in Washington.
(SEAMANS) After weeks of consultations with his advisors and generals President Bush will this evening tell us all about his new plan for winning what he calls victory in Iraq. Most of the story has been deliberately leaked by those unnamed administration sources. And the new Washington word of the day is surge – that is President Bush will propose a surge of 20,000 or more troops to be sent to Iraq to help quell the disaster – especially the bloody anarchy in the streets of Baghdad. The softer word surge is Presidential rhetoric that suggests something temporary and avoids using the much more politically provocative word escalation – or raising our troop commitment in Iraq by a significant number. We hope the President will explain tonight.
In the meantime, we can expect another surge here at home – a tsunami of investigations by the now Democrat controlled Congressional committees. We also can expect that a new media star will rise out of the flood of testimony and the hours of TV news face time. He’s called The Scariest Guy in Town by Time magazine and The Elliot Ness of the Democrats by the liberal magazine Nation.
He has for years stayed mostly under the publicity radar – quiet, unassuming but busy piling up copious files about alleged fraud that is said to have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in Iraq. He is, of course, the veteran California Congressman Henry Waxman, who is now Chairman of the powerful House Government Reform Committee and who could, it’s said by the punditocracy, become the Republicans’ worst nightmare.
Waxman will have subpoena power – the two words that shake up those walking on the dark side of influence in Washington. What’s more, Waxman is the only chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote and he says he is free to investigate anything the government is involved in.
This observer offers the opinion that Waxman’s investigative energies will be focused on the Halliburton Company and its main subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. For years we’ve heard allegations of fraud and excessive wartime profits based on no-bid contracts, out sourcing virtually all Army supplies to Halliburton. Let’s hope the scariest guy in Washington can dig out the truth.
Meanwhile, our Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and also armed with subpoena power, will probe Bush’s actions concerning domestic wiretaps, secret detentions and interrogation policies. I expect to get real answers, says Leahy. And so do we the people, who feel our Constitution has been sorely challenged by an obsessively secretive administration.
Bill Seamans is a former correspondent and bureau chief for ABC News in the Middle East.