EPILOGUE
In a hotel restaurant at Pentagon City, a retired general wears a grimace on his face as he speaks. "The Army is broken," he says. "It will take decades to fix." He had seen the first Gulf War up close, watching Dick Cheney and Colin Powell ensure that there were adequate forces deployed before they commenced hostilities. He knew the vice president when Cheney was secretary of defense.
"It was different then," he says. "The staffs were apolitical. And the military was taken care of. If we made a mistake, we did no irreparable harm. Cheney now seems oblivious to what the military needs. That's because he trusts Rumsfeld. . . .
"So we have an army that is broken. The DOD is broken. And the process is broken. Rumsfeld has left us with the smallest army since 1941. First time in the history of the country that we haven't surged up the Army in time of war. We have never not surged up the Army in time of war. They can't recruit. So we redeploy, and redeploy, and redeploy, and break down the Army.
"They're not surging up, and they're burning through equipment in Iraq." Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have done, he says, "irreparable harm" to the Army.
Across the river in Foggy Bottom, Larry Wilkerson makes a similar argument. "They have gone through so much equipment in Iraq," Wilkerson says. He argues that the real test the military faces will not be on a foreign battlefield, but in Washington. "The first challenge," he says, "is going to be the reconstitution bill that will confront the next president. I mean bringing the ground forces, and to a certain extent the Air Force, back to levels pre-Iraq. They have burned up Abrams tanks, Humvees, wheeled vehicles, five-tons, eight-tons, Apache helicopters, Chinook helicopters, all very expensive hardware, at a rate which is astronomical." This will all be left for the next Congress to repair. Wilkerson also believes recruiting an army after this war is going to be very difficult.
Another institution that will be in need of repair when Dick Cheney and George W. Bush return to the private sector is the CIA. The vice president's visits to the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq War, accompanied by his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and others from the OVP, will adversely affect the agency's ability to provide accurate intelligence for decades.
Former CIA analyst Mel Goodman, who spent twenty-five years at the agency, says the damage is lasting, if not permanent. "The CIA is a brittle bureaucracy, fragile as any other," he says. "It's now broken."
"In the history of the agency, I've never heard of a vice president making specific demands of analysts," says a former deputy director of the agency. "It's never occurred. It's without precedent." It will, he says, change the way the CIA functions. Analysts and supervisors are bureaucrats, sensitive to the complaint that bureaucracies are unresponsive.
He shares Goodman's concerns. "The mere fact that [Cheney and Libby] were out there will generate in the bureaucracy—and the CIA is a bureaucracy—a sort of thinking that says 'Gee, can we make them happy, can we continue to satisfy them?' That's not the sort of thinking you want in any intelligence agency."
The agency, he says, already had morale and organizational problems. The damage didn't end with the visits to Langley, but continued through the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and the appointment of Porter Goss as director of the agency.
An impaired intelligence agency and an impaired military are the contradictory legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. Contradictory if only because Bush described himself as a "war president" who would fix the intelligence system that failed the nation on September 11, 2001. Yet the problems are identifiable, and they can be fixed—if a president and a Congress can summon the political courage and imagination to address them.
Over coffee at the University Club a few blocks from the White
In a hotel restaurant at Pentagon City, a retired general wears a grimace on his face as he speaks. "The Army is broken," he says. "It will take decades to fix." He had seen the first Gulf War up close, watching Dick Cheney and Colin Powell ensure that there were adequate forces deployed before they commenced hostilities. He knew the vice president when Cheney was secretary of defense.
"It was different then," he says. "The staffs were apolitical. And the military was taken care of. If we made a mistake, we did no irreparable harm. Cheney now seems oblivious to what the military needs. That's because he trusts Rumsfeld. . . .
"So we have an army that is broken. The DOD is broken. And the process is broken. Rumsfeld has left us with the smallest army since 1941. First time in the history of the country that we haven't surged up the Army in time of war. We have never not surged up the Army in time of war. They can't recruit. So we redeploy, and redeploy, and redeploy, and break down the Army.
"They're not surging up, and they're burning through equipment in Iraq." Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have done, he says, "irreparable harm" to the Army.
Across the river in Foggy Bottom, Larry Wilkerson makes a similar argument. "They have gone through so much equipment in Iraq," Wilkerson says. He argues that the real test the military faces will not be on a foreign battlefield, but in Washington. "The first challenge," he says, "is going to be the reconstitution bill that will confront the next president. I mean bringing the ground forces, and to a certain extent the Air Force, back to levels pre-Iraq. They have burned up Abrams tanks, Humvees, wheeled vehicles, five-tons, eight-tons, Apache helicopters, Chinook helicopters, all very expensive hardware, at a rate which is astronomical." This will all be left for the next Congress to repair. Wilkerson also believes recruiting an army after this war is going to be very difficult.
Another institution that will be in need of repair when Dick Cheney and George W. Bush return to the private sector is the CIA. The vice president's visits to the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq War, accompanied by his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and others from the OVP, will adversely affect the agency's ability to provide accurate intelligence for decades.
Former CIA analyst Mel Goodman, who spent twenty-five years at the agency, says the damage is lasting, if not permanent. "The CIA is a brittle bureaucracy, fragile as any other," he says. "It's now broken."
"In the history of the agency, I've never heard of a vice president making specific demands of analysts," says a former deputy director of the agency. "It's never occurred. It's without precedent." It will, he says, change the way the CIA functions. Analysts and supervisors are bureaucrats, sensitive to the complaint that bureaucracies are unresponsive.
He shares Goodman's concerns. "The mere fact that [Cheney and Libby] were out there will generate in the bureaucracy—and the CIA is a bureaucracy—a sort of thinking that says 'Gee, can we make them happy, can we continue to satisfy them?' That's not the sort of thinking you want in any intelligence agency."
The agency, he says, already had morale and organizational problems. The damage didn't end with the visits to Langley, but continued through the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and the appointment of Porter Goss as director of the agency.
An impaired intelligence agency and an impaired military are the contradictory legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. Contradictory if only because Bush described himself as a "war president" who would fix the intelligence system that failed the nation on September 11, 2001. Yet the problems are identifiable, and they can be fixed—if a president and a Congress can summon the political courage and imagination to address them.
Over coffee at the University Club a few blocks from the White
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