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 House, constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein has a lot to say about the assault under way on the safeguards America's founders created to keep the nation free. Fein has been around the block a few times in Washington. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court, so he understands the importance of saying all that needs to be said while the clock is running. On this particular morning he is speaking at a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque pace, trope after pressurized trope, delivering a magisterial defense of a Constitution under attack by Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Dick Cheney exercises all the powers of the presidency," Fein says. "He has great contempt for Congress. You can get pretty cynical about Congress. Some of these people are yahoos. But that's not the point. You don't have to be brilliant to provide the checks and balances. You just need the constant questioning, the restraint."
Fein dismisses Cheney's argument that Congress overreached when it requested the names of participants in his energy task force meetings. "Bogus" and "Specious," he says. He's equally dismissive of the administration's defense of its warrantless wiretapping. "This is a crime," Fein states flatly. "FISA says if you operate or undertake electronic surveillance on American citizens, it's illegal. They don't need to do this to spy on al-Qaeda outside the country. It's not necessary. . . . The president could have asked for changes in FISA. They've amended it five times. . . . The important thing is to get the constitutional issues right. These are crimes against the constitutional architecture."
Fein doesn't expect Congress to set things right. "Congress is too philosophically ignorant to know how much of their power is being usurped," he says. He also sees the current congressional majority as accommodating the president because they belong to the same party. "They don't think about the future. The destiny of the nation is too long-term for them." After spending almost half of the last century in the minority, the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress reached a tacit agreement with the executive branch: Congress surrendered much of its constitutional authority to the president in exchange for partisan political dominance. It's particularly unfortunate that they did so on the eve of a terrorist attack that has made fear a political campaign tool.
Waiving away the waiter, Fein continues to describe the larger and more lasting structural damage done by the vice president—damage to the Constitution and the system of government it has defined for two hundred and thirty years. In the decade that followed Watergate, the Congress reasserted the authority vested in it by the Framers and redefined constitutional limits for an executive branch that refused to recognize them. It did so in response to a very evident constitutional crisis. What the vice president refers to as "the post-9/11 world" has delivered the country into another, although still largely invisible, constitutional crisis—in this case, an executive branch that has very low regard for the Bill of Rights, or for the Congress.
Whether the Democrats can take control of Congress, and, should they do so, whether they would somehow find the vision and political courage to confront the current constitutional crisis, are questions that, unfortunately, address our last best hope. The account of Ben Franklin emerging from the Pennsylvania State House after the ratification of the Constitution has been told so many times it is now a part of our received historical wisdom. As the story has it, a woman in the crowd gathered on the Philadelphia street shouted out to Franklin: "What sort of government have you given us?"
Franklin's reply was brief:
"A republic, if you can keep it."
The intersection of Dick Cheney, a supine Republican Congress, and four commercial jetliners transformed into terrorist weapons give Ben Franklin's response a currency it has not had since the Civil War.