EXCEPTIONAL
Why the World Needs a Powerful America
By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney
324 pages; Threshold Editions; $28
Former presidents may keep quiet about those who occupy the White House once they leave, but the code clearly does not extend to vice-presidents. Nearly seven years after leaving office, Dick Cheney has produced a book that amounts to a stinging indictment of President Obama as an ineffectual, America-hating, military-destroying, soft-on-terrorism appeaser whose tenure has damaged the country.
It is a case he prosecutes relentlessly. To the witness stand, Mr Cheney and his daughter and co-author, Liz Cheney, summon the ghosts of presidents past, including Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan, to testify to the greatness of America and what they call the bipartisan postwar tradition of muscular leadership on the world stage.
This is a tradition Mr Obama has shirked, the writers argue, making him a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. "The damage that Barack Obama has done to our ability to defend ourselves is appalling," they write in Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America. "It is without historical precedent. He has set us on a path of decline so steep that reversing direction will not be easy."
But while styled as a condemnation of Mr Obama, this book - appearing just as the Republican primary contest is getting underway in earnest - is actually a prod to the Republicans seeking to succeed him. Although Mr Cheney noted during a speech in Washington this week that he is no longer running for office, he clearly is seeking to influence those who are.
The Cheneys are championing a strain of national security conservatism that waned even within their own party because of the flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the later travails of the occupation. Even Mr. Bush's brother Jeb Bush has said that if he had been president, he would not have authorised the invasion had he known then what he knows now, a position shared by other Republican candidates.
And yet, the post-Iraq isolationist streak that seemed on the ascendance for a while has also begun to fade with the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Syria and Iraq and Russia's intervention in Ukraine. Although today's candidates are not showcasing the unpopular Mr Cheney in their campaigns, they are, to some extent, voicing a more hawkish message on foreign policy, especially amid the debate over Mr Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran.
Whether Mr Cheney is the right messenger for the moment is open to question. While even some Democrats agree with his criticisms of Mr Obama - that he has given away too much to Iran, that he has not done enough to help Ukraine against Russia, that his withdrawal from Iraq paved the way for the Islamic State - Mr Cheney all but invites the "well, what-about-you" counter-argument.
Mr Cheney accuses Mr Obama of misstating intelligence and lying to the American people about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, just as his own critics accused him of doing about Iraq's unconventional weapons. He criticises Mr Obama for premature declarations of near-victory over Al Qaida, just as his own critics accused him of premature declarations of near-victory in Iraq during the worst of the war in 2005 and 2006.
The first half races through the history of American foreign policy from World War II to the modern day, describing episodes of American power in the world, before getting to the Obama era, which is its real point.
As political books usually are, this one is selective in making its point. For instance, it excoriates Mr Obama for signing an order banning torture during interrogations of terror suspects without noting that waterboarding and other such techniques were stopped under Mr Bush years before he left office.
But it collects evidence of Mr Obama's mistakes based partly on some of his former advisors, like Robert M Gates and Leon E Panetta, each of whom served as defense secretary and later came to criticise the president's national security decisions. It calls out the selective memories of some Democrats, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joseph R Biden Jr and John Kerry, who also believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons making him a danger and who voted to authorise the 2003 invasion.
And it marshals Mr Obama's own words against him. It notes, for example, how on the campaign trail in 2012 he boasted of pulling all troops out of Iraq and ending the war; later he pivoted as the Islamic State took over wide swaths of Iraqi territory, saying he really wanted to leave a residual force but was thwarted by Iraqi leaders. And it recalls how Mr Obama drew his "red line," now famous, warning Syria against using chemical weapons against civilians only to abort a strike when it ignored him.
Like other books criticising Mr Obama, though, it does not simply question decisions; it assumes the worst motivations and intentions. Mr Cheney, in effect, is turning the tables on the critics who never credited him with good faith and always assumed sinister purpose on his part.
There is a groaning bookshelf full of polemics assailing Mr Cheney. Now there is a growing bookshelf full of polemics assailing Mr Obama.
©2015 The New York Times News Services
