David Brooks:
Cheney Lost to Bush: [A]fter Sept. 11 we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy.... The Bush people... did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years....
By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear.... [I]t wasn’t the Obama administration that halted the practice of waterboarding. It was a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004.
When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration.... The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy. It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy.... [I]t is absurd to say this administration doesn’t take terrorism seriously.... Jack Goldsmith has a definitive piece called “The Cheney Fallacy” online at The New Republic.... [I]n most cases, the Obama policy represents a continuation of or a gradual evolution from the final Bush policy.
What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”...
Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect.... [H]e has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.
John Dickerson:
Obama tries to show that America can have a thoughtful war president: Obama spoke to America's ideals.... Cheney spoke from a bunker.... Cheney's bunker was actually at the American Enterprise Institute, but early in his defense of the Bush administration's policies, he returned to that moment on 9/11 when he was hurried in to the White House basement.... The former vice president spoke for nearly 45 minutes and attacked many targets—Democrats, the press, Speaker Nancy Pelosi—but his central point was that President Obama has left America exposed.... Cheney's speech was all offense: Obama has made us vulnerable to an attack.... [W]th every argument Obama makes for why the situation is more nuanced than Cheney suggests, Cheney can portray Obama as legalistic, parsing, and weak. (Cheney played on this notion when he joked about Obama's speech having gone on for so long, although Cheney's remarks were only a few minutes shorter than Obama's 49-minute speech.)
The president embraced his complex task in a 6,500-word speech in which he carefully walked his audience through his own attempt to balance national security with American values. He had to defend his policies against two flanks: liberals who said he had not gone far enough in repudiating and undoing Bush administration policies and conservatives who said he had gone too far....
The Cheney mindset... launched the Iraq war. Americans still don't like the Iraq war. People think America shouldn't have gone to war and that it made the country less safe.... Cheney's argument relies on the pernicious idea that if you disagree with him over the tactics used to fight the war on al-Qaida, you are fundamentally ignorant that a war is going on.... It's also hard to sustain the claim that Obama is "blaming America first" when so much of Obama's speech was a paean to America's founding principles.... Obama never mentioned Cheney by name but claimed that those who hold Cheney's views were, while mistaken, "motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people." (In private, a senior administration official said Cheney was "monomaniacally focused on defending his legacy," fighting not just the current president but the battles he lost in the last two years of the Bush administration.) Cheney took a darker view of Obama's motivations; one of his zingers was that "it's easy to receive applause in Europe." Touché: Cheney's speech may also win applause in certain circles, but it's not going to win converts to his point of view...
Comments