The Price Of Their Security

The Price Of Their Security
By Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; Page A17

Understanding isn't the same as forgiving. The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand why they acted with such contempt for our Constitution and our values -- but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.

The basic argument that they're making deserves to be taken seriously. I don't think either man would object to my summing it up in one sentence: We did what we did to keep America safe.

That terse formulation of the Bush-Cheney apologia leaves out important details. Cheney came into office with preconceived ideas about restoring executive branch powers and prerogatives that he believed had been lost after Vietnam and Watergate; Bush either shared Cheney's views or was willing to go along. But the main narrative of the Bush presidency began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists -- the worst such assault ever on American soil.

In a not-for-attribution chat I had with a member of the Bush Cabinet a couple of years ago, conversation turned to Sept. 11. I said something like, "I can imagine what that day must have felt like for you." The response was immediate: "No, you can't."

The official went on to describe the chaos and anguish -- the shock of seeing the 110-story World Trade Center towers collapse into rubble, the fear that other hijacked planes might still be in the air, the gut feeling that the president and those around him were personally under attack. The official talked of how the president and his aides racked their memories to think of anything they might have done differently to prevent the attacks. I doubt that anyone in the White House Situation Room actually quoted Malcolm X, but essentially a vow was taken to protect the country from another assault "by any means necessary."

These were human reactions, understandable and appropriate at the time. The truth is that the administration had missed signs that an attack was brewing -- most famously, the president's daily brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." But these portents were lost amid the avalanche of information that buries every president every single day. Anyone in Bush's position would have been filled with grief, anger and resolve.

Initial reactions are supposed to give way to reasoned analysis, however. For Bush and most of his top aides, this didn't happen until far too late.

For Cheney, apparently it never happened at all. In an interview broadcast Sunday, he invited Fox News' Chris Wallace to "go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again." People have since become "complacent," he said, but the administration's actions have "produced a safe 7.5 years, and I think the record speaks for itself."

That record, admirably, includes the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the dismantling of al-Qaeda's infrastructure and the killing or capture of some of the terrorist organization's most important operatives. Shamefully, however, it also includes the violation of international and U.S. legal norms by subjecting terrorism suspects to indefinite detention and cruel, painful interrogation; the creation of a mini gulag of secret CIA-run prisons abroad; and unprecedented domestic surveillance without court supervision -- all justified, Cheney maintains, by a state of "war" that has no foreseeable end.

The Bush-Cheney record also includes the invasion of a country -- Iraq -- that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sept. 11. This misadventure has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and grievously damaged our strategic position in the Middle East. In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News this month, Bush claimed credit for vanquishing al-Qaeda's forces in Iraq. When Raddatz pointed out that there were no al-Qaeda forces in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion, the president answered, "Yeah, that's right. So what?"

Here's so what: Bush and Cheney, understandably shaken by an unprecedented act of terrorism, declared and prosecuted a "war" without specifying who the enemy was. Rather than focus on the architect and sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, they turned away to lash out at others in preemptive blows that dishonored our nation's most precious ideals.

History will note that the point of the Constitution is that the ends don't always justify the means -- and that nowhere in the document can be found the phrase "so what?"

Bush Final Press Conference According to Doonesbury

8 Years On The Dark Side

8 years on the dark side
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / December 20, 2008

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney said this week that he directly approved waterboarding to torture terror suspects. "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney told "ABC News." Asked if he believes the simulating of drowning is an appropriate technique, he said, "I do."

Last week, a bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded that the 2003 Abu Ghraib detainee abuse was not just the result of a few rogue soldiers. It said: "Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in US military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely."

Those items help cement this White House as among the most cancerous in American history. Cheney told us after 9/11 that the administration would protect us by working on "the dark side . . . in the shadows in the intelligence world." Cheney, Rumsfeld, and President Bush turned the dark side into a blind eye, the shadows into a shroud, and obliterated intelligent discourse on terrorism with raw fear. That was only the warm-up for twisting intelligence to invade Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

For eight years the administration never feared trampling truth and justice, even as Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2004 about Abu Ghraib, "Anyone who recommended that kind of behavior that I have seen depicted in those photos needs to be brought to justice." At the moment, the administration faces no serious repercussions for decisions that resulted in many times more deaths in Iraq than here on Sept. 11, 2001. Rumsfeld went from disgrace to a visiting fellowship at the Hoover Institution. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz went from miscalculating the need for hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq as "wildly off the mark" to counting the planet's dollars at the World Bank - until corruption ended his presidency there.

Bush is sure to regale us about compassionate conservatism in his sugar-coated presidential library and Cheney will mumble from some undisclosed bunker about being the great liberator. All they currently face is the judgment of history.

It was something of a consolation for history that President-elect Barack Obama named Eric Shinseki to be the next secretary of Veterans Affairs. Shinseki was the general who made the Iraq troop estimate that Wolfowitz criticized.

And at least we have some facts to go with the fiction. The Senate report released jointly by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and John McCain of Arizona said Rumsfeld's authorization of techniques "was a direct cause of detainee abuse." It also said that Bush's presidential order saying the Geneva Convention for humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to al Qaeda "impacted the treatment of detainees."

Cheney and the report give us fresh clarity on their obfuscations. For instance, two years ago, Cheney was asked on a conservative radio talk show, "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Cheney responded, "Well it's a no-brainer for me." The White House immediately trotted out the late White House spokesman Tony Snow and vice-presidential spokeswoman Lee Anne McBride to convince the press that Cheney was not referring to waterboarding.

McBride said, "The vice president does not discuss any techniques or methods that may or may not have been used in questioning." Snow was challenged by reporters that it defied common sense to deny that a "dunk in water" was waterboarding. Snow still asserted, "he wasn't referring to waterboarding. He was referring to using a program of questioning, not talking about waterboarding." Pummeled by the press over this parsing, an exasperated Snow said, "I'm telling you what the vice president's view is, which is it wasn't about waterboarding. Period."

The not-so-funny thing is that Cheney's "no-brainer" remark was an honest window into his brain. True to the eight years of this administration, even the truth must be covered with a lie.

Take Me To Your Leader (last week)

Pre-Inauguratoin

Ellen Goodman: Bush the last guy who should get a No Regrets Tour

Ellen Goodman: Bush the last guy who should get a No Regrets Tour

I was doing fine until I saw the rocking chairs. My attacks of Bush-bashing were in remission. I told myself it was time to move on, to embrace the change you can believe in and, well, you get the idea.

So when the president — he’s still the president? — popped up on television, I would repeat what Republicans told Democrats in 2000 after the Supreme Court ruling made George W. Bush president: Get Over It. Snap Out Of It. When he made a cameo appearance to socialize another piece of the economy, I silently counted the days of his tenure, backward.

I didn’t even squeal when they unveiled the presidential portrait of the man in his Casual Friday duds. And if I started to backslide, I logged on to YouTube. There — nepotism alert! — my comedian daughter Katie posted her own toodaloo to the president, a PG-13-rated satire called “Time to Say Goodbye to George W. Bush” that raised my spirits.

But then came the moment when the senior staff of Bush enablers gave two comfy rocking chairs to the man who described himself as “an old sage at 62 ... headed to retirement.” The symbolism was too much.

Hadn’t Bush just said, “this isn’t one of the presidencies where you ride off into the sunset, you know, kind of waving goodbye”?

Nevertheless, the chairs came with a video of the sunset over Crawford, Texas. It was a gift-wrapped reminder that after leaving the country in shambles, he is leaving the White House with peace of mind.

You see, what sticks in my craw is Crawford. What’s equally hard to swallow is Preston Hollow, the Dallas neighborhood where the Bushes bought a $2.1 million house that, as Jay Leno quipped, “thanks to his economic plan, he got it at a bargain.” What I can’t “snap out of” is the fact that he is preparing to write a book and design a library whose themes will undoubtedly be: “Heckuva job, George.”

The 43rd president is going home with less remorse and fewer regrets than my grandchildren express for spilling their cereal.
This is the tenor of the farewell tour being conducted across the landscape from ABC to the American Enterprise Institute. It’s the No Regrets Tour, the non-reflective “reflections by a guy who’s headed out of town. “

George W. Bush will be remembered with names such as Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Katrina. With phrases such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “mission accomplished.” He came in with a budget surplus and leaves with a massive deficit. He blew the good will of the post-9/11 world. But being this president means never having to say you’re sorry.

Leaving office, he takes credit for seven years of safety and no debit for a day of disaster. He takes credit for the boom — “it’s hard to argue against 52 uninterrupted months of job growth” — without taking responsibility for the deregulated bust. He takes credit for the surge, not the disastrous pre-emptive war.

“The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq,” he said. But would he have led us to war anyway? “It’s hard for me to speculate.”

No. 43 has the lowest approval ratings in modern presidential history. But he told Charlie Gibson, “I will leave the presidency with my head held high.” This is what puts me between a rocking chair and a hard place.

Bush says he doesn’t worry about short-term history. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.” Yet on this farewell tour, he sounds like an artist scorned by the public and sure that he’ll be seen one day as Vincent Van Gogh.

Well, history is a funny business. In an offhand survey of historians, 61 percent ranked Bush dead last among presidents, below even the barrel-scraping James Buchanan. Bush, of course, prefers Harry Truman, who rose from the ashes of his reputation.

But Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has a simple way of assessing presidents. “Great presidents rise to the occasion; poor presidents fall to the occasion.”

So Bush is headed to Texas with his rocking chairs and we’re headed into a new year with Barack Obama. I am reminded that January is named after the Roman god of beginnings and endings who looked forward and backward at the same time.

There are no do-overs. But there is no forgetting either. George W. Bush fell to the occasion.

Time to Say Goodbye to George W. Bush - Katie Goodman

The Bush Legacy

A look back as the sheriff rides off into the sunset
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
January 19, 2009
For many of us, the end of George W. Bush's presidency could not come quickly enough. But as power changes hands peacefully, the result of a decisive democratic verdict, the most important question is: What can our new president learn from the one heading back to Texas?

The Bush administration's specific failures -- in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties -- are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public's disaffection goes beyond these specifics.

From the very beginning of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his contest with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on power, the temper of the country and the proper role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a durable consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to pursue.

It is in part because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama's first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed analysis and to put whatever challenge he is confronting into some larger context. He absolutely loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his "if you have a better idea, I'll take it" approach is the antithesis of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the last eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, but he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could use on behalf of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not win.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq war required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election with political threats and campaign trail rhetoric.

"It's better to fight them there than here" was not an argument that took the average citizen's intelligence seriously. Cutting taxes rather than asking citizens to pay for the war suggested that while the president might ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush's larger failure can be found in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush's prescription-drug plan under Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from perfect. But they reflected broadly shared goals -- expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education -- and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and negotiation.

Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush's dedication to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign aid were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly national leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the basis of more moderate, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terror for electoral advantage.

A hyperpartisan domestic politics of us vs. them followed naturally from the president's instinct to confuse moral certainty for moral clarity. In his farewell address, he reminded his listeners yet again that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two, there can be no compromise."

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not between good and evil but between competing goods (security vs. liberty) or lesser evils (a draining war in Iraq vs. a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president will make his own characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may forget that a two-party system inevitably creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not an us-vs.-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of partisanship. He has been known to quote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral arrogance. He could make nuance and complexity cool again. It's not enough. But it's a start.

A New Era for America By E. J. Dionne Jr.

"A New Era for America" By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Yes, it is time to hope again.

Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between "values voters" and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician.

Above all, it is time to celebrate the country's wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation. For years, we have spoken of bringing free elections to the rest of the world even as we cynically mocked our own ways of conducting politics. Yesterday, we chose to practice what we have been preaching.

Barack Obama's sweeping electoral victory cannot be dismissed merely as a popular reaction to an economic crisis or as a verdict on an unpopular president, though the judgment rendered on President Bush is important.

In choosing Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress, the country put a definitive end to a conservative era rooted in three myths: that a party could govern successfully while constantly denigrating government's role; that Americans were divided in an irrepressible moral conflict pitting a "real America" against some pale imitation; and that market capitalism could succeed without an active government regulating it in the public interest and modestly redistributing income to temper inequalities.

John McCain believed he could win by attacking Obama as a "socialist" who had said he would "spread the wealth around." But a substantial majority rather likes spreading the wealth if doing so means health coverage, pensions and college opportunities for all, or asking the wealthy to bear a slightly larger share of the tax burden.

"John McCain calls this socialism," Obama said at a Pittsburgh rally last week. "I call it opportunity." So did the voters.

Right to the end, McCain and Sarah Palin thought ideological name-calling would work yet again. On the eve of the election, McCain attacked Obama for being in "the far left lane of American politics" while Palin warned of a victory for "the far left wing of the Democrat Party." This year, those epithets didn't hunt.

After 1980, Democrats often chose to accommodate themselves to conservative assumptions. Obama exploded the old framework. He explicitly rejected the idea that Americans were choosing between "more" or "less" government, "big" or "small" government.

He cast the choice differently. "Our government should work for us, not against us," he would say. "It should help us, not hurt us." Obama ran as a progressive, not a conservative, but also as a pragmatist, not an ideologue. That combination will define his presidency.

Since the Nixon era, conservatives have claimed to speak for the "silent majority." Obama represents the future majority. It is the majority of a dynamic country increasingly at ease with its diversity. It reflects the forward-looking optimism of the young. It draws in new suburban and exurban voters whose priorities are resolutely practical -- jobs, schools and transportation -- and who dislike angry quarrels about gay marriage, abortion and religious orthodoxy.

It is the majority of a culturally moderate nation that warmed to Obama's talk of the importance of active fathers, strong families and personal responsibility. He emphasized reducing abortion, not banning it. He honored faith's role in public life but rejected the marginalization of religious minorities and nonbelievers. For large parts of the world, his middle name will be an icon, proof of America's commitment to religious pluralism.

And Obama not only broke the ultimate racial barrier, he also spoke about race as no other politician ever has. He was uniquely able to see the question from both sides of the color line even as he embraced his black identity. He is not post-racial. He is multiracial. The word defines him as a person. It also describes the broad coalition that he built and the country he will lead.

And the majority Obama built wants the country to be strong but also respected, and prudent in its use of power. Iraq was on the ballot after all: Pew's final survey found that those who thought the decision to go to war in Iraq was wrong backed Obama by better than 5 to 1; those who thought it right supported McCain by a nearly identical margin.

Obama inherits challenges that could overwhelm any leader and faces constraints that will tax even his exceptional political skills. But the crisis affords him an opportunity granted few presidents to reshape the country's assumptions, change the terms of debate and transform our politics. The way he campaigned and the way he won suggest that he intends to do just that.

McCain is 90% Bush