May 24, 2007, 6:22 pm
Repairing the Damage Done
By Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON — More than three decades ago, Nixon White House Counsel John Dean called the Watergate cover-up "a cancer on the presidency." Another one exists today, posing a challenge for the next president to restore the office as a credible voice in foreign policy.

President Bush's detour in Iraq off the multilateral track adhered to throughout the Cold War years has caused a deep drop in American prestige abroad, requiring extensive repair by his successor regardless of which party wins in 2008.

While Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the immediate trigger for the decline of American influence, just as significant was his original failure to capitalize on the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to mobilize a truly collective global response.

The outpouring of empathy for the United States in the wake of those events was quickly short-circuited by the invasion. In diverting the American military from its legitimate focus against the real perpetrators of the attacks, Bush left the primary job undone in Afghanistan, in order to chase a more ambitious dream of superpower dominance.

A decade earlier, neoconservative theorists in the Republican Party saw in the collapse of the Soviet Union an invitation for America to assume a vastly more assertive, unilateral role in imposing its power and political ideology elsewhere.

Among these theorists at the Pentagon was Paul Wolfowitz, deputy undersecretary to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who worried that with the demise of Soviet communism the strongest rationale for a muscular national defense was gone. Yet serious threats remained, from nuclear ambitions in North Korea and the determination in Iran and Iraq to assure control of their vast oil resources essential to American power. ..

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The balance of this well-written essay can be found here.


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