Dan Calabrese

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has once again joined the battle on national security policy, and if what he said last night about Afghanistan is true, the Obama Administration deserves to be ripped to shreds for lying about what happened during the presidential transition.

Truth.

President Obama and his top people have been charging in recent weeks that the Bush Administration ignored the Afghan conflict, leaving the Obama team to start from scratch and develop a strategy. This is part-and-parcel to Obama’s dithering on his military commanders’ requests for more troops there.

Cheney said last night in a speech to the Center for Security Policy that the charge is not only false, but astoundingly so.

In fact, Cheney says, the Bush team conducted a thorough review of Afghanistan strategy in fall 2008, expressly for the purpose of giving the new administration a good plan moving forward. They did so, during the presidential transition period, with the complete knowledge of the Obama team, whom they briefed often. They sent people into the field, asked questions and developed a thorough strategy for succeeding.

While all this was going on, the Obama team asked that it not be made public, and the Bush Administration agreed.

In spring 2009, you will recall that Obama announced a new strategy in Afghanistan. Most found it to be a solid plan. Guess what. It was the Bush team’s plan. Characteristically, neither Bush, Cheney nor anyone else from the Bush Administration talked about this publicly at the time, nor did they demand credit for the plan. They had done what the new administration asked them to do, and that was that.

Only now, when Obama is running around once again blaming Bush for the challenges in Afghanistan, as cover for his own inability to make a decision, has Cheney decided it is necessary to come forward and answer these criticisms. As he said in his address:

Recently, President Obama’s advisors have decided that it’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The President’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadn’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.

Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.

Presidents who use the scapegoating of their predecessors can only get away with it if one of two things is true: 1. The scapegoating is justified; or 2. The predecessors sit back and leave the charges unanswered.

In the case of Afghanistan strategy, the Obama Administration has been counting on George W. Bush to be a good former president and hold his tongue. But as they often do, they forgot about Dick Cheney. And about the truth.

I suppose some will reflexively charge that Cheney is lying about all this. They will say the whole idea that the celebrated new Afghanistan strategy really came from the Bush team is too absurd to be believed, and it is yet one more example of Cheney trying to rewrite history to cover his wretched legacy as a torturer and usurper of civil liberties.

Because they always say stuff like that.

But it seems that Cheney’s story should be easy enough to check out. If the Obama team tries to take credit for a strategy they got from the Bush team – at the very same time they are criticizing Bush for not having had a plan – they deserve to be completely destroyed by the news media for doing so.

Of course, that’s not likely to happen, save for a few outlets like Fox News Channel, which the Obama Administration has declared not to be a news organization.

It seems you never really know the whole story until you hear Dick Cheney’s side of it.

UPDATE: Not likely to convince many on the left and/or in the media, I suppose, but Karl Rove, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, offers the same account of the Afghan war strategy developed by the Bush team, handed over to Obama and announced on March 27.

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