Brooks: Cheney Lost to Bush

David Brooks points out in The New York Times that Dick Cheney's extremist foreign policy ideas were largely abandoned in the second term of the Bush administration under Secretary of State Condaleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell has made the same point with respect to torture, pointing out that it stopped after the first Bush term.

Former Bush Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith describes the true differences between the counter-terrorism approaches of the two administrations in The New Republic.

The new administration has copied most of the (second term) Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies.

Brooks agrees.

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter...Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world. In his speech, Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect... By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.

--Ballard Burgher