Bush 41: Cheney was such an 'iron-#'; Cheney: Damn straight

I'm never sure what to make of these way-after-the-fact books that come out, especially when they're not written by the principals themselves but by a journalist - especially when the journalist in question is liberal creature-of-the-Beltway Jon Meacham. Meacham's book is called "Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush," and the Washington Post reports today that Bush 41 - who granted Meacham extensive interviews for the book - took a few swipes at his old Defense Secretary - who of course was also his son's vice president:

"He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," Bush reportedly told Meacham, speculating that 9/11 had affected Cheney's views. "Just iron-#. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East." Bush said Cheney, pushed to be more conservative by his wife and daughter, "had his own empire and marched to his own drummer." Whose fault was this? Bush 43's, Bush 41 said. "The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department," Bush told Meacham. "... But it's not Cheney's fault. It's the president's fault." He added: "The buck stops there."

As I read this, the obvious question that comes to mind is how accurate Meacham (or Post reporter Justin Wm. Moyer) might be with the paraphrases. Did Bush 41 really think Cheney - who was pretty darn conservative as a member of the House and as Defense Secretary - was "pushed to be more conservative by his wife and daughter"? People like Meacham conduct these interviews in the hope of getting their subject to say something that will stir up controversy. You get the impression that the entire Cheney discussion was all for the purpose of getting Bush 41 to find fault with Bush 43 - which he did, but not really in a father-attacks-son sort of way such much as just to make the obvious statement that responsibility always lies at the top. (Well, I suppose that's not obvious to Obama and Hillary, but that's another story.)

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That's not the fault of Bush and Cheney. That's the fault of the nation. When you lose your nerve, it's always your own fault.

At any rate, what Bush 41 said about Cheney didn't seem to bother Cheney:

"I took it as a mark of pride," Cheney told Fox News. "The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor, in terms of the number of people killed, and the amount of damage done. I think a lot of people believed then, and still believe to this day that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies." Cheney also said his family's influence on his notions of national security was debatable. "We smile about it, we laugh about it," Cheney said of Bush 41's views. "Same with my daughter, with Liz. It's his view, perhaps, of what happened, but my family was not conspiring to somehow turn me into a tougher, more hardnosed individual. I got there all by myself."

In many ways, Cheney has the most important point of view when we compare the Bush 41 administration's approach to national security and foreign affairs with that of Bush 43. Yes, Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Bush 41 when the decision was made first to go to war to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and then to stop short of taking Baghdad and removing Saddam from power. The Bush 41 and Clinton administrations tried to contain Saddam with no-fly zones, weapons inspectors and so forth, and they didn't have much success. Many will talk about how we never "found Saddam's WMDs" but the fact is that it was Saddam's responsibility under the 1991 Gulf War cease fire agreement to document what he had done with his weapons, and he consistently refused either to do that or to submit to the weapons inspections that were intended to confirm the reports he never submitted in the first place. When Cheney became vice president and 9/11 happened, one of the first things he would have understood was that all-diplomacy approach of Bush 41 guys like James A. Baker III was not effective in fighting international terrorism and its sponsors - especially if there was no credible threat of force. And a credible threat of force means that if you draw a red line and the other guy crosses the line, you actually use force. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam was Bush 43 and Cheney letting it be known that in a post-9/11 world, the United States was done screwing around with people who behaved as Saddam did. If Cheney became more "iron-#" as vice president, it's because 9/11 demonstrated that a more iron-# approach to threats and those behind them was necessary. People like Jon Meacham operate from the premise that Cheney was extreme and out of control, and he obviously conducted his interviews in such a way that he got Bush 41 to at least somewhat agree - although I wouldn't be surprised if Bush 41 later comes out and says Meacham misrepresented what he said or what he meant by it. Either way, Meacham's premise is wrong, and if Bush 41 agreed with it then he's wrong too. What really happened is that Bush 43 and Cheney took an "iron-#" approach to dealing with the world's bad actors because the 9/11 attacks made it clear that this was necessary. What also happened is that, after a few years, a nation that had initially shared this view lost its nerve and wanted to just go back to the way things used to be - and as president and vice president, Bush 43 and Cheney didn't have that option. So the way they were doing things became increasingly unpopular, fed in large part by the weasely writings of people like Jon Meacham. And the nation decided it wanted to more of iron-asses, so it chose instead to elect a weak appeaser who would let Iran get nuclear weapons. That's not the fault of Bush and Cheney. That's the fault of the nation. When you lose your nerve, it's always your own fault.