Features

Behind Every Bad Bush Move Stands Cheney

By JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL Featurewell
Friday October 31, 2003

In The New York Times the other day, Iraq’s new interim president, Iyad Alawi, thanked Americans for liberating his country and then made a simple request: please bring back the Iraqi army.  

Given what we just put into defeating the Iraqi army, that might sound like an odd proposal. But it’s difficult to find anyone today who thinks disbanding the Iraqi army was a good idea in the first place. And few thought it was a good idea at the time. Doing so not only worsened the security vacuum that now plagues the country, it took hundreds of thousands of armed men and—in a pen stroke—made them both unemployed and harder to control.  

Who was the senior administration official most responsible for this ill-conceived idea?  

Vice President Dick Cheney.  

If that surprises you, it shouldn’t. The rough patch the White House has been in since the beginning of the summer has provided an abundance of new evidence for the great open secret of the Bush era: the serial poor judgment and, in many cases, manifest incompetence of the vice president.  

Don’t believe me? Just start with the still-brewing scandal over the outing of Valerie Plame.  

Two weeks ago Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) gave voice to widespread and well-founded suspicions that Cheney’s office is the epicenter of the plot to expose Plame’s identity as a clandestine CIA operative. But the Plame story is just the latest chapter in an almost-two-year tug of war over claims that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger.  

It started when Cheney’s request for more information about the already-discredited Niger charges triggered the CIA’s decision to send former Ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger. It heated up in the fall of 2002 as the CIA and the White House wrestled over whether the uranium claims should appear in the president’s speeches. And it hit a climax when the charges got into the president’s 2003 State of the Union address.  

As those who have followed these stories know, the thread that connects each of these incidents is the central involvement of the Office of the Vice President. Cheney’s recent effort to revive the now thoroughly discredited tie between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks was only the most recent, most public and most embarrassing instance of his role in misguided and manipulated uses of American intelligence.  

As I wrote almost a year ago in The Washington Monthly, take almost any blunder, miscalculation or bad act from the Bush White House and you’ll find Dick Cheney behind it.  

Consider a few more examples.  

What was the main legacy of the vice president’s energy task force? A bill? No, it was embroiling the administration in a series of controversies and lawsuits all tied to Cheney’s insistence on running the outfit with a near-Nixonian and ultimately self-defeating secrecy.  

Cheney was also responsible for shelving the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman commission so that he could spearhead his own task force so that he could put the administration’s stamp on whatever anti-terrorism reforms eventually got adopted. But Cheney got distracted by other matters, and his task force didn’t get down to business until after Sept. 11.  

After the attacks, Cheney was one of several key advisers arguing that the White House should keep Tom Ridge’s Office of Homeland Security within the White House rather than upgrade it to a Cabinet department and thus open it to congressional scrutiny. Cheney’s obstinacy ensured that the administration’s efforts on Homeland Security were stuck in neutral for nearly eight months.  

In March 2002—right about the time he started poking his nose into the Niger uranium business—Cheney embarked on his only major diplomatic initiative: a tour of Middle Eastern capitals to line up support for war against Iraq. The initiative was a test-case for the first principle of Cheney’s foreign policy: that a strong hand from Washington is the key to building consensus among America’s allies.  

The vice president went to the region to get moderate Arab leaders to line up behind the United States against Iraq. But when he returned a week later, those friendly Arab states were reconciling with Iraq for the first time in more than a decade at a summit of the Arab League in Beirut. It was a major embarrassment for the White House and a signal rebuke for Cheney’s brand of clumsy, strong-arm diplomacy.  

Oh, one last goof: Cheney and the now-fired Larry Lindsey were the two principal voices responsible for the president’s early and self-defeating opposition to the serious securities law reform that eventually became Sarbanes-Oxley bill.  

Certainly those various Cheney initiatives are ones I would personally disagree with. But in almost every case time has shown they were substantively and politically misguided as well as damaging to the administration.  

Because he’s the consummate insider and so many Washington players have known him for years, Cheney has been able to maintain a reputation as the Bush administration’s steady hand at the tiller. The reality has always been otherwise.  

Now official Washington may finally be starting to see the light.