Guilty…

I plead guilty to making the same mistake about Bush’s foreign policy team as Ezra and Ross Douhat:

If you had asked me, circa 1999, to pick out a group of senior GOPers who I would have wanted at the table in a national-security crisis – well, I’m not sure I could have done better than Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, with (in theory, though of course it didn’t turn out that way) Brent Scowcroft whispering in Condi’s ear, and George H.W. whispering in his son’s. This is how the Bush Administration was sold to people, on foreign affairs at least.

Right. I can say with the warm glow of pride that I missed two of the biggest predictive train wrecks of the last seven years, the first being the belief that George W. Bush wasn’t going to be all that different than Al Gore, and the second that the invasion of Iraq would come off with a powerful degree of super-awesomeness. But I admit that I thought the Bush foreign policy team would be, if anything, competent. Evil perhaps, but competent. The man at the top was obviously an idiot, but I was confident that Rummy, Cheney, and Powell would lead him through the wilderness such that foreign affairs would be the area in which we suffered the least damage from the Bush administration.

Looking back, the mistake is only partially excusable. On the national security front, I still think that more could reasonably have been expected from this team. As I’ve argued in the past, Rumsfeld’s initial efforts to bring the brass to heel are quite laudable in concept. On issues of international cooperation, however, I don’t recall if I was either a) blindly optimistic, or b) in one of my neorealist Kenneth Waltz worshipping phases, because I certainly didn’t account for the damage that the administration would do to America’s “soft” power, our international prestige, and the bevy of agreements and regimes that make the international system go.

Oh, but how the veneer of competence has been stripped away…