1 Boring Old Man

The Price Of Their Security
By Eugene Robinson
December 23, 2008

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.

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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?"

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."

But, unlike Robinson, I’d prefer to focus on the "how" – how Bush and Cheney did it. They decided to throw out our foreign policy and bring in a new one, pre-emptive war. We don’t do that. So they sold us on the War in Iraq as National Defense. That’s the point. Whether it was justified, or it was a good idea, or if it worked, is no defense. They lied to get us to go to war. The "record" is immaterial.

But there’s more. They kept what they were doing secret from Congress and from us. They claimed they did it secretly for National Security reasons. That’s not true. They kept secrets because they didn’t think we’d go along with what they wanted to do, so they didn’t tell us. As Cheney points out, none of us miss his point that 9/11 got to all of us. But it doesn’t explain why they didn’t tell us what they were doing.