BITTERNESS AND BACK-BITING: BUSH AND CHENEY IN THE NY TIMES

A voice from beyond the political grave, the voice of the now 5-years-former Vice President of the United States scrapes like a hacksaw on sheet metal across Washington and New York and everywhere the NY Times Sunday Magazine is read.

Dick Cheney’s voice is full of bitterness; and his bile has found the perfect duct in Times Chief Washington Correspondent Peter Baker.

Cheney uses his channel back to the news spotlight to try to even the score with the man who gave him more power than he (or any other Vice President) ever had, and – here’s what must be most unforgivable – came to regret it: President George W. Bush. 

Of course, Baker is more than Cheney’s mouthpiece; he often sings harmony to the VP’s lead in portraying the former President.  Consider the lead paragraph with which Baker begins his story.

“In the final days of his presidency, George W. Bush sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, chewing gum and staring into the distance as two White House lawyers briefed him on the possible last-minute pardon of Lewis Libby.”

“Chewing gum and staring into the distance?”  The first picture presented of Mr. Bush seems selected to exemplify the stereotype of the under-brained, “tuned out” President that still dogs his reputation.  Throughout this piece (which is adapted from Baker’s upcoming book, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House) Bush is portrayed as a mental and moral molehill compared to Mt. Cheney (notwithstanding a few

half-hearted attempts Baker makes to moderate the image). 

“Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2,” Baker writes, “Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined.”

Then Baker cites some witnesses who defend Bush.  Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff calls George W. “the alpha dog” of the White House, and Cheney’s “close friend,” former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, says, “[Cheney] never did anything in his time serving George W. that George W. didn’t either sanction or approve of.” 

Isn’t that great?  Boy, if ever a denial of dominance actually confirmed the charge:  Simpson essentially says, everything Cheney proposed, Bush said OK.

Until he didn’t, until the second half of George W. Bush’s second term, when the President turned away from his Vice President as decisively and symbolically as he could, by firing Cheney’s one-time mentor, the man who had gotten him his first White House job, his virtual alter ego, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  Cheney told Baker directly, this was one decision about which he was informed, not consulted. “It wasn’t open for discussion by the time he came to me.”

And there were other changes.  Cheney was replaced as “the last person in the room,” by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which Baker represents as more than a new direction for on policy, but a step down from competence to comfort. 

Cheney told Baker, he and the President “were never quite friends.”  Their relationship was all business.  Whereas, Baker reports, “No one in the White House had the relationship with Bush that Rice had.  She worked out with him, talked sports with him, dined with him and Laura in the residence and spent weekends with them at Camp David.”

Relying on Rice produced a lot of changes in policy and in the Bush Administration’s basic approach to the rest of the world.  “We had broken a lot of china,” Rice told Baker, "and I don’t think that is how the vice president saw it. I think he would have liked to have kept breaking china.”

After 2006, Cheney’s unilateralism, both globally where Rice as in charge, and domestically where she wasn’t, was overtaken by diplomacy and negotiation.  Secret CIA prisons were closed, and torture techniques like waterboarding were abandoned, and the rules for military tribunals and warrantless eavesdropping were modified.  Baker says Cheney saw every one of these Bush decisions “as a sellout of the principles they once shared,” in other words, not just political adjustments, but moral failures.

This, after things had been going so well, Baker writes, when Bush and Cheney were a team.  “Bush put him on the ticket in 2000 to balance his own inexperience. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the choice seemed prescient. Cheney’s calm hand in the bunker that day and in the war cabinet in the weeks that followed gave Bush confidence.”

Hmm, Barton Gellman’s picture of Cheney on 9/11 is of a man in a panic because, willfully ignorant of the intelligence on the limited resources of Al Qaeda, he assumed that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would soon, perhaps that very day, be followed by many more.  This mis-overestimation was to resonate throughout the ginormous Global War on Terror.

But let’s go back to Baker’s theme of Cheney as Bush’s “confidence man (in a good way.)”

Baker asserts, after 9/11, Bush and Cheney together “confidently steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam.” 

Yes, they sure did confidently and falsely accuse Saddam Houssein of plotting to attack America, and, equally falsely, of collaborating with Al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks.  Bush and Cheney confidently wasted billions of dollars and thousands of American (and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi) lives in an ill-planned war to save the country from Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  Then, they confidently erected that multi-billion dollar boondoggle, the Department of Homeland Security, to ward off future terror attacks.  (So far at least, it is the pre-existing counter-terrorist agencies that have done that.) And finally, their confident assessment that the US was in such imminent peril led them to authorize the NSA surveillance system which quickly broke its mandate to spy only on suspected foreign threats and not on American telephone, snail mail and email activities.

A pretense to strategic, tactical and moral superiority may have conferred confidence, but did their confidence make Bush and Cheney effective leaders of America?  The historic record on their domestic and foreign policies suggests otherwise.

Cheney remains emphatically confident, Baker reports, that Bush’s decision against a pardon for the Vice President’s chief of staff and man of all errands, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was also a sign of moral inferiority.

Typically, Bush seems to have seen the case more simply.

“’Do you think he did it?’ Bush asked,” reports Baker of the President’s crucial consultation with White House lawyers on the Libby case.

“’Yeah,’ one of the lawyers said. ‘I think he did it.’”

Everyone agrees that Libby misinformed federal officials who were investigating the leaking to the news media of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, after her husband denounced the White House for twisting the evidence to make a case for invading Iraq.  Even Libby admitted he gave investigators a bum steer on how and when and with whom he discussed Plame’s secret (and distinguished) career, but he did so only after 9 witnesses had told on him.  He said it was just a lapse of memory.

Bush’s legal advisors would have none of it.  Baker reports, “Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, and his deputy, William Burck, pored over trial transcripts and studied evidence that Libby’s lawyers had raised in his defense. Their conclusion was that the jury had ample reason to find Libby guilty.”

Bush had already seen to it that Libby, guilty or not, would never go to jail.  He commuted his 2 and a half year sentence; but when it came to a pardon, he said no.

Why?  Well for one thing, Baker points out, pardons are usually reserved for people who have served at least 5 years in prison and have repented their crimes.  But when Fielding and Burke asked Libby if he was ready to repent, he blew them off, saying, according to Baker, “I am innocent. I did not do this.”

For President Bush, denying Scooter Libby a pardon was about process and the law.  Baker reports, the President’s top political advisor Ed Gillespie told Cheney straight out, “The lawyers are not making the case for it.  We’ll be asked, ‘Did the lawyers recommend it?’ And if the lawyers didn’t, it’s going to be hard to justify for the president.”

Baker says, “To Cheney, this was the final proof that Bush had lost his will. The president had been buffeted by critics for so long that he would not stand up for what was right.”

The Vice President, who always considered himself principled above politics, if not above democracy itself, spat out his famous moral judgment to the President:   “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.” 

“The comment stung,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to this. I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”

Of course, there was a strain on the other side, Bush’s moral judgment on why Libby had misspoken.  Baker quotes the President: “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney.” the president said.

As with Alan Simpson’s denial that Cheney dominated Bush in their first term, 2 statements Baker offers in the Veep’s defense may cut deeper the other way.

First there is this from Cheney’s friend Bernie Seebaum: “The man did what he was expected to do, and then he got in trouble for it. Nobody came to his rescue.”

And this blast from Cheney himself in an interview with Baker: “’[Scooter Libby] came to serve. He worked for me before at the Pentagon. He had done yeoman duty for us.’ The conviction was a deep scar, Cheney said. ‘He has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. That was wrong, and the president had it within his power to fix it, and he chose not to.’”

In his analysis offered to Baker, Cheney again asserts that Bush’s decision showed moral weakness: “I am sure it meant some criticism of him, but it was a huge disappointment for me.”

But wait a minute.  Who, as Seebaum put it, “expected” Libby to out Valerie Plame?  Who, in Cheney’s words, was Libby there “to serve?”  

Bush says it: “I think he still thinks he was protecting Cheney.” And Baker does draw the obvious conclusion: “If that was the case, then Cheney was seeking forgiveness for the man who had sacrificed himself on his behalf.”

Who could have saved Scooter Libby from conviction, from the “stigma he would carry for the rest of his life,” as Cheney put it?  Dick Cheney, of course.  All he had to say, from the moment the investigators put Libby under oath was, “Hey, guys, you’ve got the wrong man.  Libby works for me.  And if you want to prosecute the Vice President of the United States for showing that sanctimonious son-of-bitch Joe Wilson, there a price to be paid for shooting off your mouth, bring it on! 

“Did I say that?  Or was it my other mouth at another time?  Anyway, you get the idea, stop pickin’ on the small fry, and take this big fish on, if you dare.”  

But this great promulgator and profiteer of warfare who never spent a day in the military, this vehement enthusiast for extreme interrogation who never lay down on a waterboard, this self-admiring, dress-up Darth Vader was not about to point a serious moral finger at himself.  And he still isn’t.

No wonder, in the emotional image with which Baker chooses to end his Times piece, it is revealed that Bush’s Presidential Library contains almost no memorabilia of Cheney.  Contempt can be a two-way street.

And in this case, retrospective bitterness by omission seems morally more gracious than bitterness noisily committed.

 

  

SOME MAXIMS FOR 21ST CENTURY WARFARE

 

First, let me confess, I have never served in the military, never fired a gun, never killed anything larger than a mouse (except for one terrible accident when I was about 8 years old when, mischievously tipping a big oil barrel to see what I could spill out of it, I was caught in the act, and in dropping my side of the tilted barrel, caught a curious piglet beneath it. It is one of the worst memories of my life.  So in addition lacking any warrior experience, I am squeamish.

Nevertheless, in a 50+ year career in journalism, I have seen warfare and its consequences (on the streets of New York, Newark, and Kent, Ohio, as well as in the Balkans, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Rwanda, and have spent a lot of time talking with troops and their commanders.

Not enough to make me an expert, but more than enough to conceive these ideas.

1)    Power Projection Is Over:  Wikipedia says that power projection and force projection are the same thing, and that “soft power” can also be successfully projected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

This is, to me, very confused thinking.

Power projection, once upon a time, meant the ability of a distant state to control other states.  The apex of power projection was the era of colonial empires, when the economies and polities of distant, usually African, Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American nations, and the daily lives and ultimate fates of their people could be controlled from places like London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and, yes, Washington.

Force projection is a lesser capability.  It can intimidate, punish, oppress its targets, but it, as we have learned to our sorrow, cannot control them.  One way of looking at force projection is that it is power projection without empire, since force projection does not imply the durability or the continuity of power projection.  For its targets the difference between force projection and power projection is the difference between a sock in the jaw and life in prison.  For its projectors, the limited power of force projection was nicely summed up by American fighters in Vietnam (or Afghanistan): “We control the day; they control the night.”  

Soft power, which eschews brute force, conveys influence, which can have both durability and continuity, but neither controls nor intimidates or oppresses.  The soft power of “rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca Cola,” is impressive, whether you see it as liberating or annoying, but it, even in its state-directed iterations of diplomatic alliance or exclusion or economic sanctions allows it targets to choose their outcomes.   

What power projection controlled was not just territory, but equally important, communication.  The armies of empire had superior firepower, but, more important, they knew, both strategically and tactically, what they were doing.  By and large, their victims did not.  Imperial fleets could move with speed and stealth, outpacing both warnings and preparations.  Once landed, imperial troops could overpower territories and kill or corral their inhabitants and move on, before their next targets knew they were in danger.

And control of communications was a 2-way street.  Not only were power projections‘ victims ignorant of their future, the projectors’ folks back home could be kept completely in the dark about the crimes and brutalities being committed in their names.

Which brings us to maxim #2:

 

2)    There Are No More Secret Wars:  Back when power projection worked, wars were a secret to their victims until it was too late, and they could be kept secret from disapproving citizens of colonial powers until the state decided otherwise, or until the disapproval was of faits accomplish, which are harder to argue against, and much harder to undo.

Now, like God’s sparrows, not a bomb or missile falls unobserved, and news of the damage done can be communicated both locally and globally, instantaneously.  For the would-be projectors of power or force, even their most incurious or controlled news media must now contend with other media voices, with other, likely often opposing, points of view, and with an anarchic world of video-capable mobile phones, cameras, computers and satellite links to tell the world of every death, every burning building.

As the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases make obvious, secret attempts to project power or force can be revealed to the world, not just after the fact, but in the planning or even pre-planning stages.

As I have said before, as long as institutions involve human beings in conceiving or executing their plans, the betrayal of secrecy is not just possible, but predictable.

The cruel depredations of perhaps the world’s last empire, the Soviet bloc, its oppression, corruption and bureaucratic paralysis, were so well known that it was rejected by its own people, and shunned by the rest of the world. 

Now, with all the world witness to our projections of force in Iraq and Afghanistan (and our airborne killings in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and our connections to coupsters in Honduras and Egypt) and the threats of force against Iran regularly made by belligerent blowhards in Congress, there is a widespread sense of, “There, but for the grace, or lack of interest, of the Pentagon and the White House, go I.”

In addition to the projection of power, force or influence, there is their opposite, the projection of repulsive arrogance.  This kind of arrogance and ignorance can only be remedied by my Third Maxim.

 

3)    WHERE YOU CANNOT TELL FRIEND FROM FOE, DO NOT GO:  I was going to propose as my Third Maxim, There Are No More Short Wars, but the exception proves the rule promulgated above.  The US military did conduct short, successful wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.  What made these “incursions” short and successful was not just that they occurred before the globe was digitally interconnected but because in both cases, our troops, and almost all the citizens in both places knew who the “bad guys” were.  In Panama, there were few remaining supporters of the corrupt and criminal regime of Manuel Noriega, while in Grenada, the Stalinist Bernard Coard was almost universally seen as an oppressive, vicious usurper who had overthrown -- and unforgivably, killed -- the perhaps unsteady, but still widely-liked, Socialist Maurice Bishop.  In neither place did American forces face popular or dogged opposition, and we were in and out too fast for particular factions to use us to target their political or personal rivals or enemies.

Would that had been the case in either Iraq or Afghanistan!  In both of those places, we invaded in support of allies, most of whom had been out of their countries for years or decades before we projected our forces.

They told us who our enemies were, when in reality, they were theirs.  Think of Ahmed Chalabi conning ignorant fools like Paul Bremer and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld into disbanding the Iraqi Army, which they defined as “Baathist,” while most Iraqis defined as “ours.”

Then there were the “night raids” launched in Iraq and Afghanistan against people who were fingered by “our friends” for what frequently turned out to be very private beefs. Every household we overturned, every prisoner we took and held, often for years at a time, did indeed become our enemy, for reasons we gave them.

Now, the latest Inspector General’s report from Afghanistan chronicles a waste of billions given to people we knew or later learned were already against us.  And still the dollars spill across the country where they cannot be traced, much less monitored, because it is completely unsafe for Americans to go beyond Kabul.  Because we don’t know who is on which side, and a misjudgment can mean death.  Which leads us to the Fourth Maxim, which is actually the first and foremost rule of warfare in our time.

 

4)     IN TODAY’S WARS, THE VISITING TEAM NEVER WINS:  The former advantages that made Power Projection work, an outsider’s preponderance of firepower and control of communications no longer work.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warns, budget cuts may force him to reduce the US Navy’s aircraft carrier battle groups and the size of Army and Marine forces.  So what?  Those carrier groups are primarily useful for force projection, which is, as I’ve argued, something we should be reducing anyway, and the days of massed troops overrunning opposing hordes on big battlefields is as dead as the harquebus and halberd.  In fact, these days, with remote-controlled, satellite guided munitions, any mass of forces is simply an inviting target.  Enemies will no longer mass against us.  It’s much easier and more effective to pick us off with small groups, carrying portable, often “improvised” (meaning home-made, not put together spur of the moment) weapons.

Massive numbers of soldiers are now chiefly useful for military occupations (as Rumsfeld tragically refused to recognize when he invaded Iraq).  Even the small, mobile forces Rumsfeld championed there served principally to drag us deeper into the briar patch.  Once there, we discovered that occupation is a thankless, often hopeless task, which, one devoutly hopes, we will avoid in the future.

And the thing about occupations, and about power or force projection, is that they are temporary.  Everyone knows that: especially the home team, whether they be our enemy, our friends, or just innocent civilians.  In Afghanistan from the day the war began, the Taliban have been telling the people they live among, or within arms’ reach of, “The foreign forces will leave one day.  We will not.”

It’s not hard to draw the conclusion inherent in that formulation, and Afghans, whether horrified or pleased by that prospective outcome, live every day in its shadow.  That’s why so many of “our friends” prove perfidious.  They want their children to survive.

Everywhere we have projected power since the 1990s, our control of events has disappeared as soon as our troops have left.  In Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo, in Iraq, Somalia, and soon in Afghanistan, the projection of force leaves only one certainty behind: the rule of force, usually the force we fought to defeat.

The cost in blood and treasure and in America’s international reputation has been catastrophic.  The benefits to ordinary people are very hard to find.