The testy exchange took place in Washington on Thursday as the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled Rumsfeld along with Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. John Abizaid, the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. The dismissive tone that Rumsfeld customarily takes toward his critics was largely absent as he fielded questions about the increased sectarian violence and looming likelihood of civil war in Iraq.
The best any of this trio of apologists could come up with is that U.S. forces need to keep doing what they’re doing to keep from losing. They offered no strategy for victory, only a holding pattern to prevent a worse defeat than that America is already experiencing. An honest reckoning would acknowledge there are no good options in Iraq and that the road to failure began with Rumsfeld’s bullheaded determination to keep the number of invading troops to a minimum. The Israeli government just made the same mistake in thinking they could disable Hizbullah without committing sufficient ground forces in Lebanon. Three weeks of an air bombardment that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths brought Israel no closer to rooting out Hizbullah guerilla fighters in the south of Lebanon.
Now Israel has made a change of course that brings it closer to achieving its objective of establishing a buffer zone that could then be turned over to an international force. Israel lost valuable time along with the tacit support it initially enjoyed from Arab states that blamed Hizbullah for provoking the strikes. Still, Israel is moving to correct its mistakes. The Bush administration never made the strategy shift and instead stuck to Rumsfeld’s miscalculation that a smaller force could get the job done in Iraq—even though it was obvious from the first days of looting in Baghdad that U.S. soldiers were stretched too thin. Nobody second-guesses Rumsfeld and lives to tell the tale. What little pushback he got came from Secretary of State Colin Powell, and we all know what happened to him. He’s gone.
Former president Bill Clinton was ridiculed for his decision making, which resembled a graduate-school seminar and featured endless debate along with a reluctance to come to closure. Bush favors top-down decision making and fancies himself the CEO of the enterprise with Rumsfeld and others doing the heavy lifting. Bush is the echo chamber, repeating what he hears, and he’s heard pretty much what the American people have heard over the course of this war. Things are going well, they’re going to get better and we’ve got to stay the course because if we leave things will get worse. “I’ve got some very good sources still here in this town, and it looks to me from everything I can put together that the vice presidency has swallowed the president,” says John Dean of Watergate fame. Dean was the mole in the Nixon White House who exposed the “cancer” on the presidency, and now he’s got a new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience,” that takes particular aim at Vice President Dick Cheney as the mastermind behind the Iraq debacle and the politics of fear that motivate the Bush presidency. The title is a play on the Barry Goldwater classic, “The Conscience of a Conservative.”
The poor judgment that prompted Bush to invade Iraq can be laid squarely at the feet of Cheney. Yet the veep continues to operate largely unchecked and beneath the radar, wielding far more power than the president he serves, says Dean. Cheney has a national-security apparatus that’s more able than the statutory one: Budget decisions that used to go to the Oval Office are done at the vice-presidential level. Appointments, personnel—they’re all handled by Cheney. “I’m not one who thinks Bush is stupid,” Dean told NEWSWEEK. “I think you can legitimately say on many issues [Bush is] ignorant—and he’s ignorant by design. He’s not interested in this stuff, and he knows Cheney loves it. As long as Cheney doesn’t get him arrested, fine, let him have it.”
Cheney has been noticeably absent from the public eye in recent weeks as violence erupted in the Middle East and events in Iraq continue their downward spiral. As the November election nears, we’ll probably get more of Cheney’s “Father Knows Best” appearances on “Meet the Press,” invoking the 9/11 attacks and warning of apocalyptic outcomes if the spineless Democrats ever get power. Dean’s book examines the authoritarian personality of Cheney and other leading Republicans and shows how they justify the expansion of presidential power and a lockdown on democracy in the name of fighting terrorism. The Nixon White House had its heel-clicking authoritarian types, but they weren’t a force within the party. “Today Nixon could run as a Green,” Dean quipped. Just as Nixon’s imperial presidency was upended by Watergate, the calamitous war in Iraq is an apt ending to eight years of a flawed and failed presidency.
