Worst national security administration ever, still

Perhaps the most maddening element to the Bush administration’s assumption of the national security mantle is that some people, including some elected Democratic officials, still accept it. Reporters routinely report with straight faces about the Republican political advantage on national security issues, which, while it does exist, is due in large part to the uncritical press acceptance of the Republican claim that they’re strong on national security. We’ve visited this topic before, and at greater length, but it’s worth revisiting in light of recent events.

When you look at the administration’s national security record, you find it almost completely unblemished by success. The worst terrorist attack in anyone’s history, not counting state-sanctioned terror, occurred on the administration’s watch. We overthrew the Taliban but let bin Laden get away, and we’re letting Afghanistan get away too. We invaded Iraq and managed to create the world’s largest terrorist training camp while simultaneously handing Iran a brand new ally, graphically demonstrating the limits of even our military power, and crippling the US Army and Army National Guard. The invasion of Iraq has sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the budget, dollars that a competent administration might have used to good effect elsewhere, and the damage it has done to the Army as an institution and to individual soldiers and their families will suck additional hundreds of billions from future budgets in future administrations as we attempt to rebuild the Army and care for wounded and otherwise damaged soldiers.

Senior Bush administration officials outed one of our own covert CIA operatives, and blew the cover of a highly-placed al Qaeda informant. The administration’s regency in Iraq misplaced somewhere between $8 billion and $18 billion. The reconstruction effort in Iraq has foundered because of both bad or nonexistent planning and an impossible security situation. Three years into the war, we’re just now getting serious about training Iraqi soldiers.

People in the rest of the world view the US less favorably now, by an astonishing margin, than at any point in our history. We stand for lies. We stand for kidnapping and torture. We stand for empire. We stand for arrogance and incompetence. That image deficit has a price, for us and our allies; as Eric Brewer reported a few weeks ago, terrorist attacks and fatalities in 2005 were way up from 2004, and the administration’s frailties and excesses have made overt cooperation with the US politically, and in some instances physically, dangerous.

Most of this is the result of two factors: the administration’s insistence on approaching the invasion of Iraq as if it were a fairy tale — not a cautionary one — and the administration’s mania for power. And the result of all this is that Americans are less safe, not more, both here and abroad.

Worst. National. Security. Administration. Ever.