Peggy Noonan, whose graceful and penetrating prose is a true national treasure, pinpoints the Administration's Achilles heel: its contempt for Machiavelli. In a column saluting (two cheers, not three) Washington Post superstar Bob Woodward for writing, at long last, a really good book (State of Denial) Peggy excerpts a Woodward-proffered quote, taken from Prince Bandar:
"After Baghdad fell, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, who appears to be the best friend of everybody in the world, went to the White House and advised the president to fill the power vacuum immediately: The Baath Party and the military had run the country. Remove the top echelon--they have bloody hands--but keep and maintain everyone else. Tell the Iraqi military to report to their barracks, he advised, and keep the colonels on down. Have them restore order. Have Iraqi intelligence find the insurgents: 'Those bad guys will know how to find bad guys.' Use them, and then throw them over the side. This is advice that has the brilliance of the obvious, and not only in retrospect.
"Mr. Woodward: 'That's too Machiavellian,' someone said. The Saudi notes of the meeting indicate it was either Bush or Rice."
It was by ignoring Machiavelli's famous dictum, "If you strike at the king, you must kill him," that Bush Senior saved Saddam's bacon and left the mess for Junior to clean up. In in the purest if ironies, how about having the Saudis, who scrupulously follow the unscrupulous Machiavelli, trying to instruct an American Administration in the ways of the Master? Compounding the irony is that the Saudis financed the spread of Sunni extremism (theirs) all the while telling us for two decades that we had a "special relationship." 'Twas "special" indeed: We overpaid for Saudi oil and guaranteed their security; they repaid us by spreading the ideological poison that energizes a war for survival waged against us by genocidal atavist fanatics. Machiavelli would have approved.
Please, will somebody send Team Bush copies of The Prince?
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