Bush, Cheney did things ‘their way’
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
— Winston Churchill
In fact, he wrote 74 books. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may wind up writing a couple themselves, but the president and the vice president have approval ratings in the high 20s, and neither is known for Churchhillian prose, much less candor and publishers aren’t lining up.
Still, they’ve been busy in recent days trying to put the best spin possible on the last eight years in a series of exit interviews and speeches. Think of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way”: It always was about protecting and promoting freedom, and while mistakes might have been made, if they had it to do over again, they would.
They see an America that has been free of terrorist attacks since 9/11, an America that leads a 90-nation coalition against terrorism, a nation protected by a swifter, more tech-savvy military. They achieved this by restoring the rightful constitutional prerogatives of the president, by cutting taxes to reinvigorate an economy brought to its knees by two wars against terrorists, an economy that has buckled, albeit temporarily, under the strain of trying to provide freedom for too many people at home and abroad.
In the charitable spirit of the season, we will say only that that’s one way to look at it.
“Any regrets?” ABC’s Charles Gibson asked Mr. Bush.
“I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. . . . And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
Not a word there about tailoring intelligence to order within the Pentagon. Not a word about ignoring Richard Clarke, the White House anti-terorrism adviser, when he said — three times — that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Those pesky intelligence problems have been addressed, Mr. Bush told an audience at the Army War College on Dec. 17. “We’ll leave behind a revamped intelligence community that has new tools for staying one step ahead of our enemies,” he said, citing programs to “interrogate key terrorist leaders” and “monitor terrorist communications around the world.”
Plus, the president said, the U.S. military is now “more mobile and more agile, and better positioned now to deploy to trouble spots around the world.”
Not a word about illegal eavesdropping, torture, Guantanamo, denial of habeas corpus or the fact that the men and materiel of the newly-mobile military are so burned out from six years of fighting in
Afghanistan and Iraq that it will take years to bring them back to full combat readiness.
Nothing there about having ceded the moral high ground, the loss of U.S. prestige overseas or the fact that one of our key allies — Pakistan — may be impeding the fight against al-Qaida and the still-fruitless search for Osama bin Laden.
Appropriately, it was Mr. Cheney who identified the administration’s signal achievement. In an interview with Chris Wallace on (of course) Fox News last Sunday, Mr. Cheney said, “We have exercised, I think, the legitimate authority of the president under Article 2 of the Constitution as commander in chief in order to put in place policies and programs that have successfully defended the nation.”
This means “you’re fully justified in setting up a terror surveillance program” and installing “a robust interrogation program with respect to high-value detainees.”
You can call it “torture”; they call it a “robust interrogation program.” You can call it “warrantless eavesdropping”; they call it “terrorist surveillance.”
The question is what history will call it.
Mr. Bush is fond of the Harry Truman precedent: a president who was deeply unpopular when he left office, but whose reputation has been burnished by history. As Mr. Bush put it, characteristically, in an interview with a reporter for the German newspaper Bild in May 2006: “You never know what your history is going to be until long after you’re gone.”
At the top of the page, above “The Platform”, this snippet from the Pulitzer Platform: “oppose privileged classes and public plunderers….”.
’nuff said.