The Revolutionary

<http://www.keepmedia.com/jsp/article_detail_print.jsp> Esquire The Revolutionary Dick Cheney is the calmest man in the room. Too calm. by Walter Russell Mead | Nov 01 '04 He has many faces, all gray. He is a symphony in gray. He ranges the spectrum from vanilla to colorless to dull. Even the pink of his lip and the blue of his eyes are gray. As the Trojan horse for a contemporary American revolution, he is magnificent, as radical behavior would be the last thing suspected of someone who comports himself as he does. He is an accident of history. He is a world-historic figure. He is the greatest enigma in American public life. His name is Dick Cheney. 1. The West Wing Portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson-the country's first two vice-presidents-gaze benignly past the cream-colored walls toward the blue-carpeted floor. A copy of a Remington sculpture and a nineteenth-century painting of the Grand Tetons add a hint of the West. Vice-President Cheney meets me at the door, shakes my hand, and shows me to a seat in the half of his office furnished for guests. I think and write about U. S. foreign policy for a living at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Before getting this far-my first contact with the vice-president-I'd gone through months of screening. My latest book had circulated among the vice-president's staff to determine whether my political attitudes passed muster. Call me unaligned; there are days when I can't decide whether to worry more about the Bush administration or its critics. But I had come to the White House on a mission. This man, and this administration, were wrecking my life. I wanted to know why. I hate the decision I'm being forced to make this November. I hate the choices that the war on terrorism is imposing on us. The gravest threats of an unimaginably difficult and challenging future are coming together with some of the unhappiest unresolved conflicts in our national life, creating a perfect political shit storm. I don't like the storm and I don't like the choice. But the war is real, our divisions are real, and the choice isn't going away. You can talk about Bush all you want, but for me the choice is not so much either hating Bush or voting for him (or hating him and voting for him, which quite a few people I know seem to be doing) but about the man in whose office I was now sitting, the most powerful vice-president in history. In a very real sense, the Bush administration is a Cheney administration. There are a lot of people-and a fair few are among my friends and relations-who think of Dick Cheney much the way Captain Ahab thought of Moby Dick. In poll after poll last summer, he scored the lowest approval ratings of any of the four top national candidates. One poll showed that four times as many people think he needs his teeth whitened as think John Edwards does. That's not quite my beef with Dick Cheney. Rather, for virtually his entire adult life, he's been engaged in the systematic destruction of what I was raised to believe was progressive, decent, and forward-looking in the United States of America. Now, with Cheney's determined backing, the Bush administration had invaded Iraq in the teeth of world opinion, had stumbled into an occupation for which it was clearly unprepared, and, whether you looked at the Atlantic alliance or the United Nations, seemed to be mounting an assault on what two generations of American statesmen had grown accustomed to regarding as the fundamental principles of sound American foreign policy. And they won't even tell us why they really did it. Their stated reason-Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction-was patently wrong. They had bigger and even better reasons for what they did, reasons that would calm their critics if not win them over, but we are in the last laps of an endless presidential campaign, and on this momentous subject they remain mute. Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are as silent as the Sphinx. And so, how to make coherent what is incoherent-U. S. foreign policy in the Bush years? The great question in America today is this: Are Cheney and Bush the bearers of bad news who are adjusting American foreign policy to a new and ugly reality, or are they themselves the bad news, making the world more squalid and more dangerous as they mislead the country on a ruinous course? You have to give Cheney credit: Although he sits in the eye of the tremendous shit storm encircling the world, you will never find a calmer, more rational guy. "Looking back on the last three years," I ask, "what would you say are the administration's lessons learned from fighting the war on terrorism?" Looking a bit like Jeeves bringing his hangover remedy to Bertie Wooster, Cheney deflects the question with reassuring blandness about the difficult task. Cheney projects calm no matter what it is he is saying, which makes it possible to miss the portent of things that come from his mouth, which is of course the way he likes it. He'll tell you your house is on fire as if he were complimenting you on your tie. He is also, I am told by those who love him, the funniest man in the room. And while one's first thought might be that those must certainly be some pretty bleak rooms, I have heard him crack wise. I once heard someone ask him how he felt about being the one left to kneecap Senator Kerry, to make the down-and-dirty attacks so the president can keep his hands clean. "Well," he said, "I prefer to think of them as statesmanlike appraisals." Dry chuckles all around. Or there was the line he got off at the Gridiron Club this year, when he described his role in the Bush White House as being "a dark, insidious force pushing Bush toward war and confrontation." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told me that "he doesn't tell long shaggy-dog jokes. He's got a quick sense of humor. And it's a wry sense of humor with a nifty manner about it. He brought the situation room to tears the other day. There was a terrible article in the press about something that was going on in one of the departments. And he walked in and sat down and made a comment about it and everyone just howled. And he was late. And he walked in with his stack of papers, stuck them down on the table. I can't remember what it was. I've got enough trouble doing my job here without trying to remember humorous things Cheney said, but it was just terrific." For thirty years, Cheney has traveled through Washington surrounded by fog. Moderates-like his House of Representatives mentor and leader Bob Michel-think he's a moderate. Mildly conservative but still somewhat centrist Republicans like Bush 41 confidant and national-security advisor Brent Scowcroft thought he was one of them-conservative, yes, but sensible and prudent at the end of the day. Neoconservative intellectuals committed to the global spread of democracy think he's a fellow traveler. And the rabid fire-eaters from the fever swamps think he's one of them. Not that Cheney dissembles. The Washington Post once ran a story about Congressman Cheney that gushed about what a moderate he was. Cheney instructed someone in his office to call the paper to demand a correction. Five feet away from him, I behold this Trojan horse. What hair he's got is gray; his physique is more Homer Simpson than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bald and gray is the right look for him, by the way; in old pictures with hair, he somehow manages to look shifty. Now he seems like the old family lawyer. His body language is, well, there's not much. No chopping hands, no pointing fingers, no scowls, and, except for the occasional dry snort of amusement, no smiles or laughs. He's no war hero, either; he took five deferments during the Vietnam War because he had "other priorities than military service." So he isn't a stud, a hero, a charmer, an orator, or one of the boys. Even so, he's surrounded by his own fervent cult of fiercely loyal staff. The only public figure I've ever met with a staff this devoted and this good at insulating its principal from the world is Fidel Castro. Only when you sit down with Fidel, he talks. Cheney mostly shimmers. But here we are now, speaking about the problems we face with Iran, slowly, sagely, soporifically. Of course, Iran was now demonstrably what Cheney had once called Iraq: an aborning nuclear power with ties to terrorists. Nothing could have been more obvious or more clear as he explained why Iran's quest for nuclear weapons represents a serious threat to American interests and to our friends and allies. He spoke about his hopes that a diplomatic solution can be found and praised the widespread support of Iranians for a more democratic government and, presumably, a more peaceful foreign policy. I'd asked a senior administration official whose views reflect the vice-president's what we should do in the future if intelligence is suspect or diplomacy fails and the mullahs go for the bomb. He shrugged and smiled. "Of course I can't predict what would happen," he said. "But allowing certain types of regimes to get their hands on nuclear weapons exposes you to all kinds of unacceptable risks and dangers." Then he spoke the magic words: "At some point, you just have to do the cautious and prudent thing." Ah, cautious and prudent-who wouldn't want to do that? Allow me to translate: The vice-president believes that there are circumstances-not remote and unlikely circumstances, but possible and quite conceivable circumstances-that could lead us toward war with yet another nasty Middle Eastern regime. For many people, the "cautious and prudent" course would be to leave Iran alone, avoid war, and try to work out some way of living with its bomb. Russia has the bomb, China has the bomb; Israel, India, England, and Pakistan have the bomb; we've even learned to live in a world where France has the bomb. Why not do the "cautious and prudent" thing-and learn to live with a nuclear Iran? A few days later, I spoke to former secretary of state George Shultz about this principle, and he immediately understood and agreed. Tie goes to the runner in those cases, Shultz says. That is, when you are facing unknown, possibly grave dangers, and you really don't and perhaps can't know exactly what to do, it is safer to act than to wait. It's a positively radical idea, at the heart of George Bush's doctrine of preventative war. It is precisely this kind of thinking that got the United States into Iraq. And never before in our history, perhaps never before in the history of war and peace, have prudent and cautious added up to invade . There's the rub. And Cheney is still quietly and calmly explaining that it's the right thing to do. Worse still, I think I believe him. 2. Don't ask about that TO GET FROM CHENEY'S suite in the West Wing to his staff quarters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, you go downstairs past a small gallery of photographs, including one of the vice-president on a couch on Air Force Two watching a bearded, captured Saddam Hussein on a flat-screen TV. Then it's out onto a walkway across the White House lawn over to what, during much of modern history, was the main building that held the departments of state, war, and navy; today, it is just an annex for White House overflow. As I followed Cheney's press secretary, Kevin Kellems, across the lawn, I found myself thinking about my last visit to the EEOB. That was during the Clinton years, and they seemed very far away. I had come because someone in Madonna's entourage was toying with the idea of a Madonna concert in Havana. The question was whether a concert like that could be staged under a "cultural loophole" in the U. S. embargo against Cuba. It might be a stretch, said the Clinton official I talked to. Madonna concerts, after all, were just entertainment. If only I had come, the official lamented, with a request for someone with a more substantive claim to cultural status-like Bruce Springsteen. Ah, the old days. Kellems led me up to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's office in what used to be the assistant secretary of the Navy's office. This is the room from which Teddy Roosevelt ordered the U. S. fleet toward Manila in preparation for the Spanish-American War-and the room he left to take the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill; it is the room in which Franklin Roosevelt worried that his failure to serve in combat during World War I would doom his political ambitions. In the anteroom is a desk that used to be in the White House. Libby opened the drawer to show me where Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had scratched their names. As we settled into the Roosevelts' old office, Libby asked me what I wanted to know. Libby is a slight, fit man with sandy hair and a penchant for secrecy that rivals his boss's. Indeed, the vice-president's chief of staff is known as Cheney's Cheney. He is courtly yet intense and is given to saying, "Please, call me Scooter." Well, I said, like most Americans, I know well the actions taken by this administration; I'm less clear on why. So I'm interested in the vice-president's overall view of the world-how he sees our grand strategy in the war on terrorism, how that fits in with his broader ideas about how the world and the United States are changing. This was like farting in church. The sunny day seemed suddenly overcast and the temperature in TR's old digs dropped 15 degrees. "That's a conversation stopper," he warned me. "Don't try it." In subsequent weeks and months, as I pursued the great white whale across the United States, I would get this reaction quite a bit. "Never ask him about his worldview," Kevin Kellems warned me. "He doesn't like to talk about it." Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton professor and Cheney's deputy national-security advisor, gave me the same advice. "Don't ask about his worldview," Friedberg had warned me at the coffee shop across the street from the EEOB, where Cheney staff members occasionally stop in for quasi-confidential talks with the press. "He isn't comfortable with that kind of conversation." People who've known him for years say that Cheney's not one to talk about "deep philosophy." Alan Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, just laughed when I asked him about it. "Dick Cheney isn't interested in that kind of crap," he said. 3. What he doesn't say LIKE A LOT OF PEOPLE who work on American foreign policy, I spend a fair amount of time at home and abroad talking to foreigners about what we are doing. Some of this is organized by the State Department, which brings foreigners to the U. S. and sends Americans (of many different political points of view) to help foreigners try to understand what the crazy Americans are up to. Since September 11, I've made it my business to do as much of this as I reasonably can. This experience has made me deeply aware of just how angry many of our traditional friends are about American foreign policy in the Bush years. At home it's been more of the same. A few days after September 11, I began getting hysterical e-mails from people who saw the attacks as a plot by powerful corporations and interests to facilitate some kind of a military coup in the United States. It was the kind of sick spew of half-baked conspiracy theories, uninformed speculation, and paranoid fantasy that I remembered, hazily, from the pot smoke of the Vietnam era. As an eighteen-year-old, I had fallen for all kinds of silly theories about American energy companies having designs on the allegedly huge oil deposits off the Vietnamese coast, or the CIA's need for funds that could be obtained only through control of the rich opium routes of the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Oh, and Nixon was planning to cancel the elections, and the FBI was secretly building concentration camps to hold the antiwar movement. I've watched as new fantasies have crept steadily toward mainstream discourse. It's not just best-selling books in France saying that Bush was behind September 11. It's an increasingly paranoid tone in American political discourse as more and more people go off the deep end in confusion and bitterness about the Bush administration's war policy. The return of Vietnam-era politics to American foreign policy can only end in disaster from every point of view-especially at a time when the war we are fighting, however ineptly, is a war of survival. We could always come home from Vietnam; we don't have that option in the war against terrorism. The Bush administration's sometimes misleading, sometimes contradictory stories about why it invaded Iraq have accelerated the rapid Vietnamization of American politics. The war in Iraq in my judgment was both necessary and just, but you would never know this from the conflicting, incoherent, and inarticulate justifications that from time to time the administration has produced. Combine the incoherence of the war rationale with the catastrophic failures of policy in the aftermath of the military victory and it is easy to see why so many patriotic people have found themselves sinking into quagmires of conspiracy thinking and why an antiwar movement has grown up so quickly. I frankly would have hoped and expected that Cheney and Rumsfeld, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when Vietnam-era bitterness reached its poisonous apogee, would have understood the importance of, as far as they could, preventing or at least slowing the rise of a similar political movement today. An America divided is an America weakened, and we are deeply and painfully divided today. As I traveled into the American heartland to watch Cheney perform on the hustings, I was looking for signs that the administration was coming to grips with its failure to communicate and hoping that by leveling with the people it would begin to restore trust and consensus. At a "town hall" meeting in a convention center in Joplin, Missouri, to which only identified supporters had been invited to ask "questions," Cheney gave as close to a full and comprehensive review of administration war policy as I'd yet heard in public. He started by setting out the state of the world when he and Bush took office. On January 20, 2001, Cheney said, "the planning for the attack of 9/11 was already well under way." The terrorists had been recruited and trained. The money was raised; the attack was planned. The Taliban had turned Afghanistan into a vast safe haven for Al Qaeda and others. Twenty thousand terrorists had already been trained. In Iraq, Cheney charged, Saddam Hussein was also providing a safe haven for terrorists. He was paying $25,000 to families of suicide bombers. In the past, he'd produced and used weapons of mass destruction and had booted the UN inspectors out of his country. A nuclear bazaar was operating out of Pakistan. Muammar Qaddafi was spending "millions of dollars" to get nuclear weapons. Beyond all that, terrorists had come to the conclusion that using force against the United States got results. Going back to Ronald Reagan's withdrawal from Beirut in 1983 after 241 marines died in an attack on their barracks, Cheney ran down a list of attacks on U. S. targets that were met with mild or ineffective responses-or with changes in U. S. policy that suited the goals of the terrorists. That, he argued, was where things were when they took over. Since then, they'd overthrown the Taliban, scattered Al Qaeda, jailed Saddam Hussein, closed down the Pakistani nuclear bazaar, and put Libya out of the nuclear business. Borrowing a phrase Churchill used in World War II, Cheney said that we hadn't reached the beginning of the end, but perhaps were coming to the end of the beginning of the war. Not surprisingly, this worked for the Republican crowd in Missouri. To give him full credit, Cheney spoke without the condescension that creeps into the voices of so many politicians when they speak to a wide audience. The Cheney I saw on the platform in Joplin looked and sounded exactly the same as the one I saw in his private office in the West Wing. In an age of image consultants and hair fluffers, there's a certain discreet charm to a politician who comes across as if he were just sitting in your living room. Cheney has a solidly middle-class background and still looks and sounds like one of the neighbors. He famously drove a beat-up VW Bug while working in the Ford administration; after the defeated Ford left Washington, the story goes, Dick and Lynne Cheney drove the Bug to McDonald's for a hamburger. BUT AS THEY USED TO SAY say about Chinese food, half an hour later you're hungry again. A partisan crowd might lap it up, but there isn't much there for the skeptic or even for the open-minded swing voter. There are some basic and obvious questions that Cheney didn't even try to address: Could we have gained more allies in Iraq if we had moved more slowly and deliberately toward war? If invading Iraq was the right decision, what about the difficulties of the occupation? Should there have been more "boots on the ground" in the beginning to establish security before the insurgency got off the ground? Rather than disbanding the Iraqi army, should we have tried to turn at least some of it into the nucleus of the security forces of the new Iraqi government? And-even assuming its basic policies were right-why was the administration doing such a poor job at winning hearts and minds, not only in France, not only in the Muslim world, but virtually everywhere in the world? And what did Cheney's silence on these topics mean? Had the administration not really thought about these problems or learned anything from its experience in the terror war? In that case, would another four-year mandate mean more of the same? We then got back into the press SUVs for the motorcade out to the airport. Past a scattering of protesters-Halliburton, falling wages, war in Iraq, that sort of thing-we then clambered onto Air Force Two. In Battle Creek, Michigan, and again in Dayton, Ohio, I watched with diminishing hope as Cheney continued to utter slogans-often slogans I agree with-but without performing what I remain naive enough to believe is an essential task of a national leader in wartime: giving the public a serious and thoughtful exposition of the country's policies in a time of great danger. In Battle Creek, the motorcade took us past protesters into the back lot of a local high school, and we walked through the industrial-shop classroom into a gym with bunting and flags-not all that different from a pep rally, except that most of the crowd hadn't seen a high school classroom in twenty years. Cheney came out on the stage and greeted the partisan, cheering crowd. "This is not an enemy we can reason with, or negotiate with, or appease," he said. "This is, to put it simply, an enemy that we must destroy." Applause. "President Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the United States." The only line that gets more applause than that trope is Cheney's courageous defense of the Pledge of Allegiance: "We believe that our nation is one nation under God, and we believe that Americans ought to be able to say 'under God' when they pledge allegiance to their flag." The next morning in Dayton, Cheney attacked Senator Kerry for proposing that the U. S. should adopt a more "sensitive" war strategy against Al Qaeda. "President Lincoln and General Grant did not wage sensitive warfare," he said. "Nor did President Roosevelt, nor Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. . . . The men who beheaded Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson will not be impressed by our sensitivity." The sound bite made the national news that night, and the talking heads tut-tutted over whether this was a fair attack or an unfair attack. In context, the Kerry quote was about being sensitive to our allies and neutral opinion, not going soft on Al Qaeda, but by the time Cheney's through with him, it sounds as if Kerry wants to coddle Al Qaeda the way liberal Democrats used to be accused by Lee Atwater of coddling criminals: Willie Al-Horton. Yet there's a more substantive point as well. Cheney is a military-history buff and is very well read on the U. S. Civil War. Lincoln made a lot of mistakes in that war. There were times when things looked very bleak for the United States. International public opinion was on the side of the South. Enormous scandals rocked the government, analysts and pundits blasted Lincoln's administration, and even his allies sometimes despaired. But Lincoln knew that he had to hold on, to fight the war through thick and thin, to engage the enemy and grind him down with the North's superior numbers and wealth. In Grant he found the general who could fight this kind of warfare: ugly, costly, and at times ruinously unpopular. Cheney sees this kind of persistence as the essential quality of wartime leadership. I don't think he's wrong. Churchill, too, was a leader who saw the essential logic of the fight against Hitler and was willing to follow it wherever it led-to the alliance with Bolshevik Russia, which he hated with every fiber of his being; to the destruction of the British Empire, which he had dedicated his life to preserving; to the very gates of hell. Suppose that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder, goes this quiet, unspoken argument. Yes, the news from Iraq is bad. And yes, it is the Bush administration's fault. Well, Lincoln made one blunder after another. Churchill failed in Norway, failed in France, failed in Yugoslavia, failed in Crete, failed in Singapore. And he won the war. You cannot ask a leader to be infallible or ever-victorious in a real war. You can only ask him to persevere. Lincoln, Churchill, and Grant: I don't think Cheney invokes them just to drop names. These are clues to the kind of world he believes we live in and to the war of survival he believes we must fight. These names are a measure of the stakes he sees, of the risks he will run, the price he will pay, the suffering and damage he is willing to sustain and inflict. But as much as Cheney and Bush might like to compare themselves to Churchill, the real problem isn't that they are excessively Churchillian; it's that they aren't Churchillian enough. Churchill believed that the united will of the British people to fight was the secret weapon that would win the war, and preserving and toughening that united will was the course that he took. His wartime speeches acknowledged defeats and setbacks. Unpleasant facts were frankly stated and faced. He earned the trust of a people at war by voicing their doubts even as he stoked their resolve. Dick Cheney is not going to spellbind like Winston Churchill, nor should he try. But read Grant's memoirs; there is a plainspoken American way of laying out the remorseless logic of necessary war. Scoring rhetorical points against an opponent is okay; reducing complex arguments to sound bites is also okay. But what we see in the administration's communication strategy is tactical brilliance unhinged from any strategic vision of the long-term requirements of the war-just as its conduct of the war on terrorism in the field often seems to be strategically brilliant but tactically weak. In both cases, the result is too often summed up by a phrase that Colin Powell said to me last spring to describe the result of the invasion of Iraq, one that by August had been picked up by the president: catastrophic success. 4. Cheney's Cheney THERE'S A BLUE mountain bike leaning against the desk in Scooter Libby's waiting room; GOP-friendly publications like The Weekly Standard and National Review lie scattered on the tabletops. You can also find an occasional copy of People . As we sit down at Scooter's conference table, I put the tape recorder down and edge it closer as Scooter greets me in a quiet voice, drowned out by the rumble of a nearby air conditioner. Why hasn't the administration been more forthcoming with a fuller and more convincing argument for its policies? I ask. Scooter smiles demurely. I don't know the answer to your question, he says. When nice people like you bother to come talk to small little old insignificant people like me, then we try and make the argument. With the battered air of someone who knows it won't do any good, Scooter then reminds me of all the terrible things that war critics predicted but that didn't happen in Iraq: the siege of Baghdad that was going to turn into a new Battle of Stalingrad with thousands of U. S. combat deaths, the civil war between Kurds and Arabs, the millions of refugees, the collapse of moderate governments around the Arab world, the rush of Shiite Iraqis into the arms of the Iranian mullahs. All of it predicted, none of it happened-but none of it matters now. The failure to find WMD and the president's proclamation of "Mission Accomplished" on the USS Abraham Lincoln have forever marked neocon Iraq policy as a "miscalculation." Outside Scooter's office, a loud drone resolved itself into the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter landing nearby. "I guess the president decided to drop in to see you, Walter," Kellems shouted. But what were the real reasons for going into Iraq? I'd asked a senior administration official. There were two basic reasons, the official said. "One was to be rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, whose defiance of the world community had multiple consequences-not the least of which were very bad consequences for America at the strategic level." The other was containment. Most people who opposed the war argued that containment was working, that, as the phrase went, "Saddam was in his box." "The containment of Saddam, while not as costly in the short term as war, was still a very costly endeavor. It cost money, obviously. But that was a small part of it. "It resulted in large American forces being stationed in Saudi Arabia. It resulted in a very bad message to the world, including to Islamic terrorists, that America and the world could be defied successfully. It advanced the radicalization of certain Saudis and the glorification of Saddam. Every day he succeeded in flouting us was another day in which the message to the Islamic world would be that America could be defied." And the connection between containment and Al Qaeda? I asked. Between our Iraq policy and September 11? The official pointed out fatwas from Osama that cited the effects of sanctions on Iraqi children and the presence of U. S. troops as a sacrilege that justified his jihad. In a real sense, September 11 was part of the cost of containing Saddam. No containment, no U. S. troops in Saudi Arabia. No U. S. troops there, then bin Laden might still be redecorating mosques and boring friends with stories of his mujahideen days in the Khyber Pass. As it was, the administration took what looked like the path of least resistance in making its public case for the war: WMD and intelligence links with Al Qaeda. If the public read too much into those links and thought Saddam had a hand in September 11, so much the better. This must have looked good at the time, but the failure to find WMD and the insurgency in Iraq have brutally exposed the political miscalculation in the administration's strategy. Suppose the administration had taken on the tougher job of laying out the full strategic case for the war: that Saddam's refusal to implement the cease-fire agreement was endangering the United States and its allies, and that the United States would act to enforce full compliance with the cease-fire. Saddam's persistent obstruction and ultimate expulsion of weapons inspectors would be one of the items on the charge sheet, but not the only one. Not everyone in the United States or abroad would have accepted this case or agreed with the president's decision for war if coercive diplomacy failed, but we would clearly be in better shape today if the administration had done more to put the full range of its views on the table. Again, this is the way Winston Churchill would have done it. When the French capitulated to the Germans in 1940, Churchill realized that the French government had broken its pledge to Britain that it would keep its fleet out of German hands. Add France's naval strength to Germany's and Hitler was within striking distance of the naval superiority that would have enabled him to invade Britain. Churchill determined on a preventative attack; French ships could turn themselves over to Britain, sink themselves, or be sunk by the British. Churchill did what he had to do, but he also stated his purpose and his reasoning openly and clearly. He did not hype his case-he didn't fluff up evidence to say that Hitler was an imminent threat to integrate the ships into the German navy. He confined himself to the facts, and the case he made in public was essentially the case he made in the secret deliberations of the war cabinet. As a wartime prime minister, Churchill won and kept the trust of British, allied, and, ultimately, most neutral public opinion during a long and deadly war marked (as all wars must be) by its fair share of failures, blunders, deceptions, and tough moral choices that, judged by the calmer and higher standards of peacetime, looked dubious at best. Bush and Cheney chose another path, and we are all living with the consequences. 5. Tough Town... "FUCKING CRAZIES" is what Secretary of State Colin Powell is said to have called the Cheney camp in a 2002 phone call to Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, as the administration pushed for an early war in Iraq. And while it seems objectively true that neither is likely to be high on the other's Christmas list, Powell has never lost his broad sympathy for much of what the Bush administration has accomplished. "We stopped a friggin' war!" a senior State Department official bellowed into my phone when I asked about what American foreign policy had accomplished in the Bush years-referring to American mediation of the crisis between India and Pakistan, when intelligence analysts (for what that's worth, I'm compelled to add after the Iraq WMD fiasco) thought nuclear war was less than a week away. Officials also run down a list of great powers with whom the Bush administration has enjoyed stable and businesslike relations: China, Russia, India, and Japan. France and Germany aren't on that list-which may say something about how the Bush administration defines "great powers." When Secretary Powell is asked about administration miscalculations in Iraq, he is blunt. "We did the right thing at the right place and the right time," he says about the invasion, but admits that the administration miscalculated the difficulty of achieving its goals in Iraq. The insurgency, he concedes, is not under control, and the Pentagon has been forced to increase troop deployments beyond its original plans. From a State Department point of view, the biggest miscalculation was the failure in postwar Iraq. The State Department had a cadre of experts who worked on a detailed plan for the occupation, but the White House was steadfast. Nobody who wasn't what one official called a "true believer," nobody who wouldn't drink the Kool-Aid that Ahmad Chalabi was serving up, was allowed to play a major role in the postwar planning. This meant that, among other things, the Coalition Provisional Authority had a weak plan and a thin team when it woke up one morning as the government of Iraq. I saw this myself in Amman, Jordan, last spring, when I spent the evening with a group of CPA officials-young, bright, and in jobs way too big for them. Kids fresh out of grad school who, if they were in Washington, would be interning and making copies were running major programs for a country whose history they knew nothing about and whose language they didn't speak. The CPA did not remake Iraq. The State Department official I spoke with notes with some satisfaction that Iraq policy is now back in the hands of the institutions and bureaucracies that, whatever their faults, have the resources to plan and administer large-scale efforts. Interestingly, the one question about Cheney to which I could never get a clear answer was whether he had a direct role in supporting Chalabi-the now-discredited figure whom neoconservatives had plugged for years as the answer to America's question of who could and should replace Saddam. "Since Chalabi lost some of his luster, it's amazing how many people really never met him," the State Department official says. "Well, maybe once or twice. He's been airbrushed out of a lot of pictures. I know. Tough town, my friend." OF COURSE, listening to the State Department has not always been the best way to predict what the Bush administration will do. I decide to go find out what the rest of the war Cabinet thinks about lessons learned and what they can mean for the future. There's nobody better to start with than Paul Wolfowitz, former protigi of Dick Cheney, former boss of Scooter Libby, and currently serving as deputy secretary of defense in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Wolfowitz is probably the most hated person I've ever met. In much of the Arab world, he's so symbolic of what many see as the Jewish control of American foreign policy that I've taken to using him in my lectures there. I point out that George Soros has been identified by former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as the leader of the worldwide Jewish plot to keep Muslims down. And Paul Wolfowitz, I tell my Arab audiences, is of course widely seen as the Jewish evil genius behind Bush-administration policy in the Middle East. And yet George Soros is so angry with Paul Wolfowitz's foreign policy that he's spending millions of dollars to drive Bush, and therefore Wolfowitz, out of office. So even if we imagine that America is run by the Jews, there are at least two Jewish conspiracies. I don't know what's more frightening: that in the year 2004 we have to use arguments like this at all; that in most of the places where I've given this talk, the idea that American Jews aren't an organized, controlling bloc with a single agenda is new; that many of the people who think American foreign policy is a Jewish plot are professional diplomats; or that I'm starting to have to make some of these points to European as well as Arab audiences. In person, Wolfowitz is a perfectly calm and friendly guy. He looks and sounds much more like a kindly professor of international relations than an evil genius heading a Jewish clique determined to plunge the world into misery and destruction. Wolfowitz has bent under these blows, but he's still unbowed. "I've still got the scars," he says of the negative press coverage he's received as the insurgency has gained strength. But he's still hopeful "that eight months from now, a year from now, you have a situation in Iraq where Iraqis have largely taken charge." When I ask him about where the administration is headed, he goes back to the late 1940s and to Democrats like George Marshall and Dean Acheson who laid the foundations of what became the bipartisan consensus for the cold war. He reminds me that Acheson decided to be "clearer than truth" in explaining the communist menace to the American people and points out that this era, which we now think of as characterized by bipartisan consensus, was actually a bitter and divisive time-featuring Joe McCarthy, for one thing. But it's clear enough that Wolfowitz, widely regarded as the scariest neocon this side of Richard Perle, is spending real time thinking about consensus building in foreign policy. That was not a prominent neoconservative theme before Iraq. When Wolfowitz looks ahead to a Bush second term, he sees a return to the Middle East peace process. "We were on the verge, I think, last May, with that Sharm al-Sheikh meeting, of really starting to make some breakthroughs . . . and you could almost feel it slipping away as the situation in Iraq got more difficult." Even as this reminds me how expensive the war has been, it's reassuring. Serious moves by the Bush administration on the Arab-Israeli front would do more than any other single step to rebuild relations in Europe and in parts of the Middle East. I take advantage of my time with Wolfowitz to learn more about Cheney. Wolfowitz had worked for Cheney in the Defense Department back under Bush 41. And unlike Cheney, "Wolfie," as he's affectionately known, is comfortable having conversations on the dreaded worldview question. So I ask him: Is Cheney a neocon? It's a question that's debated in Washington, as the war in Iraq is seen as a brainchild of the neocons. Wolfowitz thinks for a minute. "No," he says. "Cheney can't be a neocon. He isn't Jewish." There's an interesting subtext to this line. The rap about Jewish intellectuals in Wasp circles a generation or so ago was that Jews were bright but "too ideological." They allegedly valued theory over practice, consistency over efficiency. They took good ideas and carried them "too far"; they learned their statesmanship from books and professors rather than at their grandfathers' knees. There's a whiff of that old fault line in the Bush administration today; especially after Iraq, you can sense a recoil from following the full neocon logic to its furthest and hardest conclusions. Seriously, though, I say to Wolfowitz. Is Cheney a neocon? Again, Wolfowitz thinks. "Not really," he says finally, "though he has moved in that direction." I would get almost exactly the same answer from William Kristol, neocon editor of The Weekly Standard . For both Kristol and Wolfowitz, Cheney is at heart a realist. That is, Cheney is more concerned about things like the national interest than abstract ideas like democracy. Spreading democracy might be good in itself, and it might also be good for American power, but Cheney was more likely to start from the position of wanting to defend and advance American power than wanting to defend and advance democracy worldwide. Cheney is a realist, and the neocons themselves are feeling a little chastened. Rebuilding a domestic consensus and reviving the peace process stand high on Wolfowitz's agenda. This is progress. NEXT ON MY LIST comes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who brought Dick Cheney into government in 1969. Rumsfeld, too, seems to be singing out of the multilateral hymnbook these days. "There are an awful lot of things the United States can't do alone that we simply have to have the cooperation of other countries on," he tells me. The Defense Department is engaged in a review of post-hostility efforts, and Rumsfeld says it is clear that successful post-hostility policy "requires all elements of government cooperating." This was not DOD policy in the Chalabi era. And when it comes to questions of grand strategy in the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld again sounds very much in the American mainstream. Pet conservative causes of the 1990s, such as abolishing the United States Information Agency and substantially downgrading our efforts in public diplomacy, now look like mistakes to him. Rumsfeld wants to revive the USIA to make America's case more effectively abroad. And like Wolfowitz, like Libby, like Powell, Rumsfeld these days is looking back to the early years of the cold war for how to develop strategies and political support for a long struggle in which ideology could count as much as military strength. In the Pentagon these days, this war is looking more like the cold war than like World War II. Rumsfeld makes a point about Cheney's conservatism. "I don't know that he's that conservative," he says. "I never thought of him as being particularly conservative. He's kind of a western Republican. His views and his positions are more rooted in understanding our country and the people of our country than in any theoretical underpinning." So: the Pentagon has gone soft and the war Cabinet is retreating to the center? Not quite. On the need for preemptive war, Rumsfeld isn't giving an inch. What about the fact that our intelligence was faulty in Iraq? I ask. Does that mean we need to hold back on the use of force? Not at all, Rumsfeld says. The combination of unreliable intelligence and the danger of WMD could lower, not raise, the threshold for preemptive war. "If someone is threatening you with a snowball," Rumsfeld says, "you can afford to think he won't throw it and take the hit if you're wrong. No great loss. "But if you start thinking about the potential of biological weapons, if you take the hit, you could affect tens of thousands of people, and you could have that run down through another generation or two." As Cheney might put it, at some point you have to do the cautious and prudent thing. THERE ARE SOME who look at these facts and hope that the Cheney Revolution in American foreign policy has burned itself out-that the neocons had their tail feathers scorched in Iraq and won't be flying so high in the future. Cheneyism was tried, and it failed. W.'s second term will look more like his father's first. That's not how I read it. Cheneyism as an approach to post-cold-war American foreign policy was first articulated in a 1992 draft of a national-defense review paper that shocked many readers in the U. S. and abroad with a call for the U. S. to deter other countries, even its allies, from ever challenging American military supremacy. The outcry was so great that the paper was disavowed and a sanitized version appeared in the waning days of the first Bush administration. The famous National Security Strategy document of 2002 is a direct intellectual descendent of that earlier paper. That document contains both sides of Cheney's agenda: unchallengeable and untrammeled American strength-including preemptive war-and the kinder, gentler words about cooperating with allies and working in multilateral institutions. The confusion and tension between the traditional and radical elements in Cheneyism reflect the confusion and tension most Americans feel as we look at the war on terrorism. On the one hand, we know that we need the help of others to defeat this enemy, and that we somehow need to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, especially, to stop the growth of terrorist ideology. On the other hand, we want the president to take any military steps necessary to protect us from our enemies-and we don't rule out anything against people who want to use dirty bombs or biological weapons in our cities. We want to be loved-but 64 percent of us are willing to use torture in some cases if that's what it takes. This tension in Cheney's worldview is our tension. If Cheneyism doesn't cohere, it is because we live in an incoherent time. 6. The Cheney Era BRENT SCOWCROFT, who was George Herbert Walker Bush's national-security advisor, told me a story about the vice-president that reminded me just how unlikely this Cheney era has been. We all remember that in 2000 Cheney was asked to pick the perfect running mate for Governor Bush. An elder-statesman role. And of course we all know that after his exhaustive search, Cheney said, Governor, I have found him, and he is me. Scowcroft says that when Cheney joined Halliburton in the nineties, he thought he was leaving public life for good. "I'm convinced he made a strategic decision," Scowcroft says. "He turned his back on government, and he decided he was in a new career. I saw him at a panel discussion held at the Bush Library in the late nineties. It was crystal clear that he wasn't following foreign policy closely. He had turned his sights to a different career and thrown himself into it, and I don't think he had any intention when Bush asked him to look for a vice-presidential candidate to end up with the job." Now, no American vice-president has ever had anything like Cheney's power, and no one in the government knows as much about American foreign policy and how it is made as Cheney does. For an accidental vice-president, Cheney's behavior has been radical and his impact profound. And yet, as I watch him fielding questions from the daily press in a swirl of aides, he's the calmest man in the room. The vice-president is in a back room at a convention center in Dayton, Ohio, where he's just finished delivering a slashing attack on John Kerry. The speech was vintage Cheney: defining the differences between the tough leadership and clear stands that the country needs and the indecisive waffling of his despicable opponents. Nuance is just a fancy French word for flip-flop. And as for the war in Iraq: The danger from Saddam's WMD program and his ties to Al Qaeda left us no choice. Cheney has been criticized over and over by the national press for this defense of the Iraq war-especially the links to Al Qaeda, which neither the 9/11 Commission nor anyone else thinks are as strong as Cheney insists they are. But he's got his story and he's sticking to it. And as he sits next to his wife at a small table in a room crowded with staffers and daughter Liz carrying her four-week-old baby in a basket, he looks somewhat vital. The cast-iron certainty has been that a second term would be the end for him, but as we now know, this man is capable of upending cast-iron certainties by the score. Let Bush win in November and by, say, 2006, Cheney might start to think that his stented heart is feeling better, and maybe he's ready for the big job. The urgency of the task facing America as he sees it is not likely to lessen in four years, and who better to carry on the work than the man who has been the principal author for the entire post-9/11 era? After all, he is only three years older than John Kerry. Bush might give him the dedazo , as the Mexicans call the blessing a retiring president gives the designated heir. Members of the Bush family are mindful that the country might not be dynastically inclined, thus freezing brother Jeb out in 2008. A caretaker Cheney presidency, goes this thinking, would keep the seat warm for Jeb and prevent somebody else from remaking the Republican party in the meantime. As he finished his speech, I realized that he made no reference to the dramatic military events of the day, with U. S. forces on the brink of assaulting the holiest shrine in Shiite Islam during its confrontation with the Mahdi militia. It was stunning. Clearly the campaign is moving down a scripted and predetermined path, and responding to the uncertainty and concern many Americans feel in response to historic events in the war isn't part of the script. The look crossing the vice-president's face spoke loudly: This is a campaign rally. Who in his right mind would bring bad news to these good people? And so as my time with the war Cabinet comes to an end, I'm afraid that they've missed the most important lesson of all. "Never, never, never," Winston Churchill once wrote, "believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." Those who take a democracy to war must build the kind of support that can see them through the setbacks and disasters that must inevitably come. If it's your war, you must embrace it, good and bad. And you owe it to the people to explain yourself. This the Bush administration has not yet learned to do, and the consequences could be severe. Meanwhile, a few feet away, Vice-President Cheney speaks in the flat calm that is his authority. And we are put at ease. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'