Former vice president Dick Cheney appeared at the Center for Security Policy last night, an organization headed by the neocon and former Reagan Defense official Frank Gaffney, to receive the Keeper of the Flame award. And keep the flame aloft he did. Cheney lashed into Obama for allegedly dithering when it comes to protecting American security in Afghanistan, selling out Eastern Europe on missile defense, and betraying intelligence officers.
With his usual penchant for understatement, Cheney concluded:
There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered every time without equivocation, and this is one of them. We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys. We cannot hope to win a war by talking down our country and those who do its hardest work - the men and women of our military and intelligence services. They are, after all, the true keepers of the flame.
It might be tempting to dismiss Cheney's remarks as so much conservative boilerplate. But that would be a mistake.
For one thing, Cheney's speeches drubbing Obama contain a fairly coherent critique. Sure, the cheap shots are always present--to say that Obama is "turning the guns on our guys" is a shocking statement, one that, in effect, equates Obama with terrorists. It's further proof that Cheney will stop at nothing to smear and tarnish his political opponents.
But even as he throws globs of mud at Obama, Cheney has, it must be said, done a fairly effective job of reversing reality--presenting the Bush administration as successfully protecting America, at home and abroad. Instead of Obama rectifying the egregious failures of his predecessors, Cheney suggests that he's undoing the very essential steps that he and Bush took to safeguard the homeland. Once more, the spineless liberals who cut and run during Vietnam are abandoning the fight.
It's mythology, but should Obama come to grief in Afghanistan, then it could become a potent myth. The argument on the right that's being prepared is that a feckless Obama lacked the gumption to carry the fight to the terrorists. Where Bush had them on the run, Obama is allowing them to regroup. The Center for Security Policy's mission statement offers a succinct statement of the credo that animated the Bush administration and that continues to serve as the lodestar for the right: "We as a nation must also work to undermine the ideological foundations of totalitarianism and Islamist extremism with at least as much skill, discipline and tenacity as President Reagan employed against Communism to prevail in the Cold War." Of course, this overlooks the fact that Reagan jettisoned his hardline policies in his second term and signed arms-control agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev--something that Gaffney, who resigned from the Defense Department in protest and is an astute intellectual, does not mention on the center's website.
To a surprising degree, the GOP has formed a new coalition of the willing to attack Obama as weak on foreign policy. No matter what he does, he's assailed as not doing enough and acting as a new Neville Chamberlain. Has Obama already sent more troops to Afghanistan? Then he needs to send even more. Might he strike a deal with Iran on its nuclear weapons program? It's simply a ruse and a snare. The right will not agree with any agreement that Obama might reach with any of America's adversaries.
The torch that Cheney is carrying for the right isn't burning all that brightly yet. If Obama is successful, it will flicker out into oblivion. But if he isn't, Cheney will have laid the groundwork for a resurgence of some of the most retrograde policies this country has ever seen.