The Economist
Lexington
Dick Cheney’s memoirs
More vice than virtue
NEAR the end of his eight-year stint in office, Dick Cheney was asked if he had any advice for the incoming staff of Barack Obama. “Make sure you’ve got the vice-president under control,” he replied. Although he meant it as a joke, the laughter must have been somewhat forced, on both sides. Democrats viewed Mr Cheney as the source of everything that was wrong with the administration of George Bush junior—a sort of bespectacled, balding Darth Vader. Mr Cheney’s new memoir, despite its breezy self-justification, does little to dispel that notion, showing exactly how a vice-president can run amok.
Mr Cheney and his successor, Joe Biden, were selected as running-mates for much the same reason. They both added an air of experience, especially in foreign policy, to candidates with thin résumés. Mr Cheney had been secretary of defence under Mr Bush’s father, and had served on the intelligence committee during his ten years in the House of Representatives. Mr Biden was chairman of the Senate’s foreign-relations committee. Both were getting on in years, and had abandoned their own presidential ambitions. That, it was thought, would allow them to provide their bosses with honest counsel, and the public with a reassuring sense that there were wise old men in the wings.
Mr Biden has taken up similar public responsibilities to Mr Cheney as well. He handles lots of foreign policy (he is just back from China and Japan) and heads the odd task force (there was one on the middle class, for example). Perhaps most importantly, he haggles with Congress over contentious bits of legislation. He was instrumental in striking the deal that extended various tax cuts, as well as unemployment benefits, last year. Earlier this year he led negotiations on raising the debt ceiling. Although the president subsequently took them over, the eventual deal seemed to rely in large part on the vice-president’s earlier handiwork.
Yet whereas Mr Cheney was seen as the grey eminence behind the sometimes buffoonish Mr Bush, Mr Biden seems a cheery backslapper compared to the professorial Mr Obama. That is partly temperament. Where Mr Cheney is peremptory (he once publicly told a senator “Go fuck yourself”), Mr Biden is boyishly enthusiastic (he assured Mr Obama—also publicly, but whispering—that his health reforms were “a big fucking deal”).
Mainly, however, Mr Cheney’s Vaderish reputation rests on his enthusiastic advocacy of the most controversial policies of Mr Bush’s presidency. He remains unapologetic to this day about curbing civil liberties after September 11th, 2001 and about invading Iraq on the mistaken premise that it was brimming with weapons of mass destruction. There is not only no problem, in his view, with waterboarding or Guantánamo, but not even much to discuss. They were serving a useful purpose, some lawyers had been found to sign off on them, and that was that. Questions that have consumed America for years, such as whether the authorities should have been more primed for September 11th, do not even merit a mention in his book.
Mr Cheney’s only regret seems to be that not everyone in the Bush administration was always as farsighted and steadfast as he, and so balked at bombing Syria or adopting tougher stances with North Korea and Iran. Colin Powell, Mr Bush’s first secretary of state, is portrayed as a sulking saboteur; Condoleezza Rice, his successor, as a bumbling appeaser. Even Mr Bush had his lapses in the vice-president’s eyes: he decided to go along with twitchy lawyers in the Justice Department, for example, when they questioned the legality of a counter-terrorist eavesdropping scheme.
Mr Cheney’s account, in short, makes it easy to see what went wrong. He was so focused on smiting bad guys that he lost track of everything else. By his own admission, he “had little patience” for constitutional niceties. He does not seem to have paid much attention to public opinion, either. The Republicans’ crushing loss of both houses of Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, thanks in large part to war-weariness, crops up only in passing, as a possible impediment to the planned surge in Iraq. And the economy was definitely a secondary concern. Mr Cheney dedicates just nine pages of his book to the causes of the financial crisis and the government’s response—only one page more than he does to the vexing question of whether America or Israel was best placed to bomb a suspected nuclear facility in Syria.
What Mr Biden could learn from him
That Mr Cheney was too fixated with the “War on Terror”, as he always styles it, complete with portentous capital letters, and too ready to argue that the ends justified the means, comes as no surprise. In retrospect, what is astonishing is how good Mr Cheney was at peddling his agenda, despite its obvious flaws. He seems to have been a very shrewd judge of how far he could push the top brass, the bureaucracy, the courts and Congress. On the very day the terrorists struck, he recounts, he started writing a list of what authority the president would need to respond, and how best to secure it.
Therein lies the most striking difference between Messrs Biden and Cheney. The former had spent the 36 years prior to his elevation to the vice-presidency in the Senate; the latter had run the White House, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford, the armed forces, as secretary of defence, and a multinational conglomerate, as chief executive of Halliburton.
Mr Cheney, in other words, knew how to get things done. For the most part, he put that skill to poor use. But as the Obama administration lurches from one dust-up with the Republicans in Congress to another, with most of its agenda abandoned by the wayside, one cannot help wondering what difference it would make to have a man with the cunning and single-mindedness of Mr Cheney whispering in the president’s ear.
http://www.economist.com/node/21528260
No comments:
Post a Comment