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Peter Wehner, a former advisor to President George W. Bush known for his strident defense of his former boss’s policies, has continued to be a vocal proponent of rightist domestic and foreign policies since leaving government service. The longtime conservative insider has worked for several Republican administrations, and is currently a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) and a contributor to Commentary magazine, both core neoconservative institutions.

During his time at the Bush White House, Wehner served as one of the president’s key policy advisors. Wehner’s position as head of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, an in-house quasi-think tank created by Karl Rove, was characterized by the Washington Post as the “rarest of White House jobs.” 1 According to the Post, Wehner was “paid to read, to think, to prod, to brainstorm—all without accountability. He recalls the words of White House senior advisor Karl Rove when he interviewed for the job: ‘He said my job is to bug him.’” 2 His “Wehner-grams”—frequent policy proposals on both domestic and foreign policy—were widely circulated in and out of the administration. Former White House colleagues have highlighted the influential role Wehner played. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter, said that Wehner “developed a tremendous influence at the White House, not by being a policy implementer but by being an idea and argument generator." 3

Wehner’s principal role often seemed to be the administration’s attack dog. For example, in response to a 2006 column by conservative writer George Will that lambasted Bush’s Middle East policy as the “triumph of unrealism,” Wehner wrote a widely circulated rebuttal, arguing that Will’s views on the Middle East would “lead to death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable.” 4 Ignoring the violence in Iraq associated with the U.S. occupation and blowback from the push to establish Western-style democracies in the Middle East, 5 Wehner contended that Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” would “assist in the rise of liberty and civic habits in the Middle East. That will take longer to achieve than the historical blink of an eye. And one thing we know for sure: we were never going to get there under a policy that looked away from, or even promoted, tyrannical regimes in the Arab world.” 6

Wehner also attacked Will for insisting that Iraq should not be the focus of efforts to combat terrorism, writing, “Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism because [terrorists] have made it so. Wishing it were not the case—even writing that it is not the case—won't change that reality.” 7

Wehner has continued to defend the Bush record in Iraq since leaving the administration in 2007 to join the EPPC, 8 one of several institutes established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role for religion in public policy (others include the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Institute on Religion and Public Life). In May 2008, Wehner characterized Bush’s Iraq plan as “working in terms of security, in terms of politics, and in terms of economics.… I don't see any reason why you'd get away from it.” 9

Wehner’s defense of Bush and his Mideast record has continued since the former president left office. In February 2009, he argued that the record in Iraq was a tribute to Bush’s freedom agenda: “On the larger matter of whether events in Iraq have discredited the cause of advocating liberty abroad: they have not. We have learned vital lessons from our experience in Iraq, from the supreme importance of having reliable intelligence, to the need of having the right invasion/counterinsurgency strategy in place when fighting a war of this kind, to the value of having a president who is determined and courageous enough to pursue a change in strategy, even when it comes very late in the day.” 10

Wehner’s perch at Commentary magazine has given him a high profile platform to defend the policies of the Bush administration. In an online-only article for the neoconservative flagship magazine, Wehner criticized conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan for arguing, after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, that the United States had “very little moral standing to protest an invasion of a sovereign country.” 11 Sullivan’s “moral equivalency” between Iraq and Georgia was “indefensible,” wrote Wehner. 12

Sullivan responded, “Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army—because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? Pete Wehner belonged to the administration that did this. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, the question of moral equivalence becomes a live one. When an American president has violated two centuries of civilized norms, how could it not be, for any serious person with a conscience?” 13

Since the election of President Barack Obama, Wehner has maintained a vigilant critique of the Democratic administration’s actions, issuing a series of warnings about potential failures on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. In a February 20, 2009, entry for Commentary’s “Contentions” blog, Wehner cited Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer to argue, “The first month has been ragged, and some disturbing signs have arisen. It’s still very early—Obama has yet to complete his first full month in office, after all—and he may get his sea legs soon.  He remains a formidable political figure. And sending 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, while done in a somewhat haphazard way, was reassuring. But one thing is for sure: the adjustment has been harder than he and his team envisioned, and the results are underwhelming.” 14

Wehner has contributed to a number of other right-wing and neoconservative media outlets, including the National Review’s “The Corner“ blog, and the Weekly Standard. Topics of his articles have included his views of the presidential candidates, the benefits of Bush administration Medicare policies, the supposed successes of the “Freedom Agenda,” and fawning reviews of books penned by right-wing writers like Dinesh D’Souza. 

Wehner’s track record includes employment under three Republican presidents and serving as a director at the now-defunct Empower America, a rightist advocacy group founded by William Bennett in 1993. According to his EPPC bio, Wehner was a speechwriter for Bennett (the secretary of education for Ronald Reagan), and later an assistant to Bennett in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, before joining the Bush administration. 15