However much you disagree with President Bush–and I disagree with virtually everything that he has done since taking office–you have to admire his loyalty. Despite a growing chorus of voices insisting that he purge his staff of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and others, President Bush has insisted that these men are acting in the best interests of his administration. Good for him. I don’t mean to suggest that Cheney and Rumsfeld are ideal choices for their jobs. Quite the opposite; they are exactly the kinds of people that the President should not have surrounded himself with. They are arrogant and mean-spirited, they’ve repeatedly given bad advice, and they have failed to give the idealistic young business man from Texas the realpolitik grounding that you would expect from a couple of career Washingtonians. In fact, all of those reasons would be grounds to fire either of them. But that’s not why President Bush is being asked to fire them. President Bush is being asked to make them the scapegoats for Iraq, in the same way that the administration made former FEMA director Michael Brown a scapegoat for their negligent response to Hurricane Katrina. But the fault for Iraq does not lie with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, Tommy Franks, George Tenet, or anyone else who supposedly passed along bad information or made poor decisions. The fault lies with President Bush.
Even a casual reading of history would have told the President that democratic transitions are long, slow, and violent processes. When an autocrat falls from power, he is often succeeded by a prolonged period of anarchy. This is especially true in countries with deep ethnic or religious divides, like Iraq. Furthermore, democracy is hard. It almost never takes on the first try; even here in the United States we are on our second constitution (not counting the substantial revisions that followed our own civil war). The President knew all of these things; he has used most of them in speeches at one point or another, when it suited his interest to do so. Furthermore, the President knew from the start that anarchy in Iraq would only increase the relative position of various terrorist groups, including al Qaeda. And yet, knowing all of that, the President decided that we needed to go to war to evict Saddam Hussein. Certainly Cheney and Rumsfeld supported that decision, but it was the President’s choice.
Furthermore, the management of the war is the President’s responsibility. He is Commander-in-Chief; the position of Secretary of Defense was created in order to assist him to do that job, and not the other way around. So, when there wasn’t a plan on the ground to adequately secure and police Iraq, that wasn’t the fault of Secretary Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, or anyone else. That was the fault of the President. When they did not react to the insurgency quickly or effectively at the beginning of the war, that was also the fault of the President.
Because, once again, it is not as if none of these things were unpredictable. Critics of the war, including the President’s own father, had long predicted that the fall of Saddam Hussein would be the start of sectarian violence and chaos. Yes, the Pentagon should have had plans well ahead of time to prepare for that eventuality. But it is the President’s job to ensure that those plans exist. It is his job to say “yes, I agree we’ll be greeted as liberators, but what happens if we are not?” President Bush, it seems, never asked that question. He assumed that the line being handed to him by his advisers was the right one. And he was wrong.
Look, things are going poorly for the Republican Party right now. But they hold all the cards, and have for a number of years now. They have no one but themselves to blame for Iraq, for the state of the budget, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina, or for the fiasco that is the Medicare Prescription Drug plan. Right now, they are trying to look for scapegoats: Cheney and Rumsfeld for Iraq, Brown and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Katrina, the lack of a line-item veto for the budget deficit, etc. But the real problem is that they picked the wrong guy to be President, they approved the unnecessary and chaotic federal reorganization project that was the creation of the DHS, and they bought into the bad economic policies that gave us the budget deficit. The Republican Party has gotten virtually everything that they have asked for since President Bush took office, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
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