Profit From Failure
Spencer Ackerman raises the question of whether Cheney is, in fact, a victim of success, on the order of LBJ. I think it should be reversed. Cheney profited from failure. The Bush administration was obsessed with missile defense rather than stopping terrorism before 9/11. It seems to have viewed the terrorist threat as a sideshow to the big issues of foreign policy. After 9/11, however, Bush and Cheney did exactly what Colin Powell warned them not to do--overreact.
The administration went so far as to confect a bogus case for war in Iraq, whipping up ties between Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein. Without the war on terror, however, I am convinced that Bush would not have won reelection in 2004. A case could be made that Cheney and the neocons retarded rather than accelerated the collapse of the GOP--that it would have occurred even sooner absent the terrorist threat.
The GOP profited politically in the 2002 and 2004 elections by banging the drum up about the terrorist threat. By 2006, however, the administration's short-term political gains began to evaporate. In 2008, they disappeared completely. It became clear that Bush had mired the U.S. in the sideshow of Iraq to the detriment of the war In Afghanistan, which is going anything but well. Before Paul M. has a coronary here, I would like to underscore that I'm emphatically not saying that there is no terrorist threat. What I do believe, however, is that Bush inadvertently ended up becoming al-Qaeda's best recruiting agent, which is why al-Qaeda is now so alarmed about a Barack Obama presidency.
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