I like the appointment of Eric Shinseki to head the Veteran’s Department, and for many of the reasons that E.J. Dionne lays out. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Democrats relate to the military and intelligence community, and it’s just a fact that there is an unhealthy level of mutual distrust between the Left and those in charge of national security. We have to repair the rift because the Democrats are going to take over the whole enchilada in little over a month. When the CIA/Pentagon does something, they will essentially be doing it in the name of the Democratic Party.
I think the key (and this applies equally to both sides) is to listen more carefully. The CIA, if they’re being honest with themselves, should now see the wisdom of a lot the Left’s critique of our foreign and intelligence policy over the last fifty years. They have noticed that it was the Left that defended their performance on pre-war intelligence and that defended the honor of Valerie Plame Wilson. They should also notice that the Left is not defending torture and extraordinary renditions.
But we have to listen to the CIA, too, when they tell us who the bad guys were and who was fighting the good fight on the inside against the abuses of the Bush administration. And we should not be asking for everyone’s head on a pike. Our party is going to be responsible for running the CIA and we want it to perform its core functions at a high level. We need experienced people to accomplish that. If there is going to be accountability for Bush-era abuses, it should start at the very top. This was never a case of a few bad apples. These problems evolved out of direct orders from Bush, Cheney, Addington, and Libby.
Obama should not be rewarding those that went along with torturing people, but we have to remember that part of the problem came from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel assuring the CIA that they were not breaking the law. We have to have accountability, but we also have to balance that with creating an effective, functioning government. There are some bad apples in the CIA that should be removed or whose promotions should be blocked. But civilians, on the outside, are not in a good position to make those distinctions.
And we can say the same things about the Pentagon. The Pentagon spent the Bush years developing a reputation for doing things like spying on anti-war Quakers and letting the procurement office become a house of corruption. It probably needs a more thorough housecleaning than the CIA. The Obama administration must resist the urge to spare Bob Gates embarrassment, as they go about cleaning up the rot that has developed in the Pentagon.
Obama has reached out to the military so far, and with good governance the breech between the culture of the left and the culture of the military will largely disappear. But, first, we have to be willing to listen and learn from each other’s earned wisdom.