Obama's overseas trip was given a pretty thorough discussion on today's Morning Joe, but I was a bit taken aback by this statement from Joe Scarborough, provided by Media Monitor Jason J.:
Let me tell you that, I agree this is a successful trip. But Americans may not like it, a lot of elites in New York may not like it, people that live in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side may not like it, but you need a Dick Cheney also. You need somebody that scares bad people of the world.
Uhm...what? Look, I agree that America should project a goodly share of resolve and toughness, but wow -- you'd do well to not mistake "Dick Cheney" for "toughness." Toughness, to me, is not squirreling yourself away in your undisclosed redoubt to be vaguely creepy and every once in a while drop an F-bomb on the floor of the Senate. And I'd really dispute the notion that Dick Cheney ever inspired even a scintilla of fear in the hearts of the "bad people of the world." Seems like he mainly instilled fear in the hearts of decent Americans, Constitutional scholars, and our allies.
If we were to suggest that our overall foreign policy of the past eight years was an extension of the Hooded Justice of Dick Cheney, one would be forced to conclude that Cheney as a fear-instiller was an abject failure. During that period of time, Hezbollah grew bolder, Hamas grew bolder, Iran grew bolder. We managed to lower the temperature of the Iraq insurgency, not through fear, but by buying off the insurgents. Russia, I seem to recall, launched an offensive into Georgia, humiliating the administration's buddy, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Oh, yeah, and then there was that whole part where 3,000 Americans died in the worst mass-casualty terrorist attack on the homeland in the past 100 years, followed by that time when we just stopped fighting the perpetrators of that attack (known by the colloquialism, "War In Iraq"). I'm sure the way they were allowed to remove themselves to safe havens and reconstitute their network must have been terrifying for them. Good job, Dick Cheney.
Scarborough goes on, expounding on what he believes provides proof of concept to this Cheney theory:
SCARBOROUGH: Here's the thing we have to remember, Barack Obama -- and I'm saying this just to say yes, it was a good trip, yes, make people like us more -- when we had the most inclusive outreaching president in Bill Clinton, we were attacked by Islamic terrorists in '93, we were attacked at Khobar Towers i think in '97, three African embassies in '98, attacked the USS Cole in 2000, a president that went to war three times to defend the rights of Muslims in Somalia, in Bosnia, and Kosovo where he selected Muslims over Christians, we had a President that was afraid to take out Osama bin Laden, according to some intelligence reports, because he didn't want to offend the Muslim world. Outreach is wonderful. Makes us all feel good about being Americans. Yes, I would rather 60% of people in Turkey like me more than 13% of people in Turkey like America. But this is an ugly world.
But the ugliness of the world INCREASED under Bush/Cheney foreign policy.
One of the worst-appreciated points in the debate over national security policy is that the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies shouldn't be understood as counterterrorism measures that have, in some sense or another, "gone too far." Rather, we need to grasp that they've been wholly ineffective and, as best one can tell, merely made things worse. The fact that George Bush's invasion of Iraq has killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden's airplane hijacking is one illustration of the point. Another would be this map I've borrowed from the Center for American Progress team. The blue marks are pre-9/11 terrorist attacks, the yellow ones are between 9/11 and Iraq, and the red ones are post-Iraq attacks. Iraq and Afghanistan are just marked in red rather than trying to make pins for each attack in those unfortunate countries.
And here's the critical part of the study:
A study conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) since the Iraq invasion. When Iraq and Afghanistan, which together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities, were excluded, there was still a 35 percent per year increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks.
So, as one can see, the presence of Dick Cheney hardly "scared the bad people of the world." The Cheney years were their Renaissance.
[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]