Haunted
by the Past
By
MAUREEN DOWD *
New York Times
Published:
November 1, 2006
Washington - Many
Republicans have been tut-tutting about the author of “The Audacity of Hope”
having the audacity to hope.
“I
think people might want a little more experience than that, given the nature of
the times we live in,” Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity.
Charles
Krauthammer wrote that, despite Senator Barack Obama’s charms, he could not win
in ’08: “The reason is Sept. 11, 2001. The country will simply not elect a
novice in wartime.”
But
if there’s one thing W.’s reign proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is this:
Experience, like affectations, can be dangerous.
They
will fill up history books with all the myopic misjudgments made by a war
council with a couple of centuries of experience, blunders that undermined
America’s security and integrity, wrecked Iraq, loosed Osama, and made the
world more dangerous.
Those
on the president’s “dream team” of foreign policy advisers were haunted, not
strengthened, by their years of past service in top jobs. When they got the
chance to run the country again under W., all they wanted to do was finish
unfinished business, misapplying old ideas to new crises, like those who
sabotage new romances with baggage from old relationships.
On
his initial tour as defense secretary, for Gerald Ford, Rummy felt that Vietnam,
Watergate and then Jimmy Carter robbed him of his opportunity to rein in the
military brass, who were always impudent enough to have opinions about the
military. Determined to banish America’s
post-Vietnam fears about using force, he ended up creating another Vietnam that
spurred more fears about using force.
As
Bush 41’s defense secretary, Mr. Cheney prepared the ’92 Defense Planning
Guidance draft with his aides Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. It called for
swaggering world domination in the wake of the cold war, asserting that America should
intervene to stop any countries — allies or foes — from challenging its
supremacy.
A
decade later, with a more jejune Bush as president and a more jittery post-9/11
America, Cheney & Co. brought back the loony plan and renamed it the Bush
doctrine.
Vice
and Rummy corroded the Constitution by using the terrorist attacks as a pretext
to correct the past: as Ford administration big shots, they felt emasculated by
the post-Watergate reforms; three decades later, they saw a chance to shoot
some steroids into executive branch powers.
Condi
Rice had been a Russia
expert in Poppy Bush’s White House, so she and the older cold warriors like
Rummy and Cheney readily saw the red menace under every rock. Like the
“experts” who failed back in the 1960s to see that Red China and the Soviet
Union were enemies of each other, not friends, they naïvely assumed that Saddam
and Osama were in bed together and that because they were both bad guys, going
after one was going after the other.
George
Tenet’s experience tracking bin Laden did him no good, because he was so
nervous about being the only Clinton
holdover that he was overly sycophantish to W., assuring a skeptical president
that proving Saddam had W.M.D.s was a “slam dunk.”
W.
let the past cloud his judgment as well. He went along with Vice and Rummy on
invading Iraq
because he thought he could avenge and one-up his father simultaneously.
When
Sonny, as Colin Powell called him, announced his candidacy in 1999, I asked him
if it was scary to run for president knowing so little about foreign affairs.
“There
will be moments when situations, incidents will flare up,” he replied,
blissfully unaware of the conflagration to come. He said he could lean into his
dad’s advisers, and trust his gut about which ones to trust and which to “kiss
off.”
Yesterday,
Senator Obama, asked about his short résumé, made the same claim that judgment
is more important than experience. But he acknowledged that President Bush has
given learning-on-the-job a bad name.
“I
mean, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have an awful lot of experience, and yet
have engineered what I think is one of the biggest foreign policy failures in
our recent history,” he told The Times’s Anne Kornblut. “So I would say the two
most important things are judgment and vision. Well, judgment, vision and
passion for the American people, and what their hopes and dreams are.”
Those
who declaim on the need for Senator Obama to have more experience must forget
who’s running the country. It often seems that the most inexperienced person
alive is George W. Bush — even after six years in office.
________________________________
* TPO's comment: This is an old op-ed article by Maureen Dowd. But it is interesting that the wrongness of the personages she was writing about (Cheney, Krauthammer, Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and G.W Bush) remains relevant, and hauntingly true even today.