Marble Composition

Cheney's Worldview

Today over at Dan Froomkin's joint at the washingtonpost.com, he led us to some pretty insightful remarks regarding the Cheney administration's views on Iraq and American power. First, here's Dick (a.k.a. Big Time):

But King did ask what Cheney thought of a Democratic proposal for a timetable for withdrawal, and the vice president let loose:

"If we were to do that, it would be devastating from the standpoint of the global war on terror. It would affect what happens in Afghanistan. It would make it difficult for us to persuade the Iranians to give up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. It would threaten the stability of regimes like Musharraf in Pakistan and the Saudis in Saudi Arabia. It is -- absolutely the worst possible thing we could do at this point would be to validate and encourage the terrorists by doing exactly what they want us to do, which is to leave. . . .

"The fact of the matter is that we are in a global conflict. It's not just about Iraq. It's -- we've seen attacks around the world from New York and Washington, all the way around the Jakarta and Indonesia over the course of the last five years. Our strategy that we adopted after 9/11 of progressively going after the terrorists, going after states that sponsor terror, taking the fight to the enemy has been crucial in terms of our being able to defend the United States. I think one of the reasons we have not been struck again in five years -- and nobody can promise we won't -- but it's because we've taken the fight to them.

"And if Jack Murtha is successful in persuading the country that somehow we should withdraw now from Iraq, then you have to ask what happens to all of those people who've signed up with the United States, who are on our side in this fight against the radical extremist Islamic types of bin Laden and al Qaeda. What happens to the 12 million Iraqis who went to the polls last December and voted in spite of the assassins and the car bombers? What happens to the quarter of a million Iraqis who've gotten into the fight to take on the terrorists? The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting. And no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Now here's Dan:

I've written repeatedly about the White House's apparent lack of a realistic sense of what's going on in Iraq. (See, most recently, my May 24 column .)

Cheney's powerful disquisition to CNN offers an insight into why that might be. In Cheney's mind, the U.S. role in Iraq is fundamentally part of a global chess game -- not a troubled, bloody occupation. And in his mind it's still a war with extremist Islamic terrorists -- when instead, as is increasingly obvious, U.S. troops are largely fighting and dying in battles with Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation, and a sectarian civil war is breaking out all around them.

When you view the U.S. military as merely a tool to expand American power, and as just a piece on a board game, these policies make sense. To Cheney, it seems, the military serves as just a placeholder in Iraq; a bullwork shoring up America's interests in the world. I tend to look at them as some of the best citizens we have in this country. People with famalies and homes. People that are being horribly misused, and stuck in the middle of a civil war. Dan also stears us to this bit from Salon, referring to a new book by Ron Suskind: The One Precent Doctrine: (more from Dan)

In a review of Suskind's book in Salon, Gary Kamiya offers this context and perspective: "Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a 'global experiment in behaviorism': If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior.

" 'The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.' This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration's first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to 'dissuade nations abroad from challenging' America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

"The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a 'default' -- a fallback, driven by the 'realization that the American mainland is indefensible.' America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. 'If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,' Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: 'It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response.' "

And if you subscribe to that theory -- that invading Iraq was fundamentally a way of delivering a message about U.S. power -- you can see why anything short of absolute victory would be so unpalatable.

Of course, there will be no "victory" in Iraq for the U.S. From here on out, as Josh Marshall puts it, it's just a slow burn off of lives, money, and materiel. This also makes clear why President Bush has stated that withdrawing troops from Iraq will be left to future presidents. Instead of bringing to a close a massive foreign policy blunder that he started, he's already told us that he'll leave it for someone else to clean up. This time it won't be his Daddy's benefactors; it'll be the entire nation. Thanks George.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 6/23/2006 04:32:00 PM