Washington’s Overrated ‘Old Hands’

By Joe Conason

Following the 9/11 attacks, conventional commentary constantly informed Americans that we were lucky to be led at that perilous time by the old Republican hands in the Bush White House. Not George W. Bush himself, of course, whose résumé featured an abbreviated stint in the Texas Air National Guard and perhaps a few visits to Tijuana. We were supposed to thank providence for the wisdom and skill of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, along with a phalanx of deputies, assistants and subalterns. They had won the Gulf War of 1991, and their presence in Washington dated back to the Nixon era. They would know what to do.

Nearly every decision those highly qualified individuals made, from the day they took over in 2001, has been wrong, starting with the dismissal of the al-Qaida threat and moving on to the invasion of Iraq; the diplomatic standoffs with Iran, North Korea and Syria; the sidelining of the Mideast peace process; and the unilateral impulse that has damaged American alliances around the world.

Rarely during the past seven years did Sen. McCain, whose own foreign policy skills and knowledge have begun to seem seriously overrated, speak up in dissent from the failed Bush policies. His most significant contribution to the national debate—namely, his insistence that the U.S. commit more troops to Iraq—is overshadowed by his much more consequential mistake of supporting the invasion on false pretenses. More than once he has displayed the same stubborn ignorance about Iraq, Iran and the Gulf region that led to this strategic disaster. They underestimated the division between Shiite and Sunni, the influence of Iran on the new leaders of Iraq and the resistance of the Iraqi people to any prolonged American occupation.

That persistent ineptitude has brought the supporters of the war to an ironic comeuppance, as the Iraqi government and people demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops on precisely the same timetable suggested by Sen. Obama. The bombshell remarks uttered by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his aides over the past several days should not be completely surprising to anyone who has paid attention to Iraqi public opinion or to the botched status-of-forces negotiations between the United States and Iraq.

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