Advice To GW

[Annie]

Which I mostly concur with:

http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004837.html

October 31, 2005
The Troubled State of Bush

In Vietnam, the voices of the "cut-and-run" crowd ultimately prevailed, and our allies were betrayed after all of our work to set them on their feet. Those same voices would now have us cut and run from Iraq, assuring the failure of the fledgling democracy there and damning the rest of the Islamic world to chaos fomented by extremists. Those who look only at the rosy side of what defeat did to help South Vietnam get to where it is today see a growing economy there and a warming of relations with the West. They forget the immediate costs of the United States' betrayal. Two million refugees were driven out of the country, 65,000 more were executed, and 250,000 were sent to "reeducation camps." Given the nature of the insurgents in Iraq and the catastrophic goals of militant Islam, we can expect no better there. As one who orchestrated the end of our military role in Vietnam and then saw what had been a workable plan fall apart, I agree that we cannot allow "another Vietnam." For if we fail now, a new standard will have been set. The lessons of Vietnam will be forgotten, and our next global mission will be saddled with the fear of its becoming "another Iraq."

--Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, in a must-read Foreign Affairs piece.

Iraq Remains Critical

Back in October of 2004, I wrote a a long post in this blog supporting the re-election of George W. Bush largely based on the central importance of Iraq. Then and now, I believe to my core that the stakes in Iraq are immense, and could well determine America's standing on the global stage for score years or more. Despite my revulsion at Abu Ghraib, my contempt for hubris-ridden, reckless Administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld, and my fear that George Bush's lack of foreign policy expertise could have him proving an emperor with no clothes--I calculated that the alternative would be materially worse. After all, judicious observers took away from many of John Kerry's campaign utterances regarding Iraq that he would do his utmost to extricate us from there with, shall we say, a purposeful rapidity--one not necessarily linked to achieving our war aims. Put differently, a so-called decent interval, rather than a conditions-based withdrawal schedule. (Previously, I have explained why I suspected Kerry's worldview helps evidence such a view). Indeed, Kerry is now on the record calling for the "bulk of American combat forces" to be out of Iraq by end 2006. Such an announced timetable would prove a terrible signal of weakness to the still quite potent Iraqi insurgents. Many would of course opt to keep their powder dry and fight another day. Iran and Syria would be disincentivized to behave better vis-a-vis their Iraqi neighbor. Shi'a and Kurdish militias would similarly be less incentivized to integrate into a multi-ethnic, national army. Chances of large scale sectarian and/or ethnic conflict would ratchet up. And so on.

This said, I suppose it's no secret that this blog has become rather disenchanted with President Bush and his administration. Indeed, I no longer really count myself a supporter, truth be told, for some of the reasons I will spell out below. But on Iraq, Bush deserves significant credit nonetheless. With the Iraq war increasingly unpopular, and Bush's poll numbers hovering in the high 30s and low 40s, the easier path to tread would be that Kerry advocates. Start bringing the boys home, the better so the restless American public espies some exit from the Mesopotamian morass on the horizon. To Bush's significant credit, he is instead continuing to see the effort through. And not merely in some mindless, 'stay the course' fashion.

Yes, the post-blitzkrieg start to the Iraq occupation, defined by Rumsfeld and Co.'s seeming disdain for anyone with regional expertise, their manifest failure to comprehend the massive scope of effort nation-building entails, the various tactical blunders experts had forewarned against (wholesale de-Baathification and disbanding of the Iraqi Army, among others), the breezy transformationalist nostrums (leading to far too few troops in theater initially)--all contributed to, at best, a lost year and, at worst, perhaps a fatal wounding of the Iraq project. But now, however, things are taking a decided turn for the better. As Fareed Zakaria puts its succinctly here:

The simplest proof of the myriad American errors is that, starting around May 2004, Washington began reversing course wholesale. Troop withdrawals were postponed. The decision to hold caucuses and delay elections was shelved. The American-appointed Governing Council was abolished. The hated United Nations was asked to come in and create and bless a new body. In recent months, the reversal is wholesale. The United States has been bribing tribal sheiks, urging the Iraqi government to end de-Baathification and make a concerted effort to bring the Sunnis back into the political process.

Indeed. Take Zal Khalilzad's tremendous efforts as our man in Baghdad. Largely as a result of his tireless work, Sunni buy-in to the political process is on an uptick of late, the potential show-stopper issue of Kurdish federalism is still being kept in check, and the constitutional process, though very bumpy, rambles on in generally positive direction. In addition, Ayatollah Sistani has been able to keep a lid on the worst temptations of crude majoritarianism--that is, large scale, indiscriminate Shia revanchism. Particularly given that our counter-insurgency efforts have improved of late as well, it is even possible to argue that we are winning, if very tentatively, in Iraq. It's a slow, hard grind--but, make no mistake, progress is being made. Yes, as John Burns' (one of our very few journalistic national treasures) points out today, there remain pitfalls aplenty and Sunni alienation, of late mitigated somewhat, is still very real and very prevalent. A civil war is still quite possible. And Sunni tactics may be all that is changing, feigning buy-in to, for example, piggy-back on 'train and equip' to be better armed for the advent of sectarian conflict post a possible U.S exit, say. So we must be hugely cautious in our optimism. And realize that the Iraq effort must still be counted in years. But, yes, Bush is trying--and trying hard--despite Katrina (this could have proven a relatively easy excuse to pack it up and go home), despite the polls, despite the cries for 'phased' withdrawal from many quarters. Let's us at least give him credit on this score.

Still, one must look at foreign policy choices through a prism of cost and benefits. And the costs of the Iraq imbroglio have been immense. 2000 of our countrymen and women are dead. Well over ten thousand wounded. Our allies have lost many of their young to this war. God knows how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and scourge of large scale suicide bombings. Our moral position in the world has suffered grevious blows because of detainee policies and legal memoranda defining torture down that eager enablers like the John Yoos and Albert Gonzalezs and Don Rumsfelds facilitated. (History will not be kind to these individuals, and many Americans will come to be tremendously embarrased by this dark chapter in our national history). Billions and billions of dollars are down the drain (even more if you count the impact of higher oil prices, some of which is at least an indirect result of the Iraq war). Strained alliances. I could go on, of course, but it is clear the costs have been enormous.(At this point one can see the bias, yet read the rest). And yet. If, and what a big if it is, if an Iraqi democracy can emerge, it may have all been worth it. For, along with several key issues like managing China's rise to great power status, the specter of radical Islamic jihadism presents one of the great national security challenges of our time. In a chaotic region marked by unresolved regional disputes, corrupt ruling elites, authoritarian political governance structures, massive economic inequalities, demographic trends marked by huge amounts of frustrated young persons searching for political space and economic opportunity--Iraq is where the United States, via the happenstance of history (9/11 leading to greater concerns about Iraq's assumed WMD capability)--has taken a stand to attempt a lofty project of democratizing the Middle East.

 

[Annie]

*

Look, there have been all the easy cat-calls that the Wolfowitizian project was but some risible utopic Leninist excess. To be sure, it is certainly ambitious in the extreme. It may prove to have been a fantasy, ultimately. And, yes, why should people not be angry? The Ken Adleman's spouted on about "cakewalks," the Shinseki's were ingloriously dispatched for daring to call it right on troop levels, leading neo-cons have now conveniently moved on off-stage to post-Iraq life (as George Packer memorably put it in the pages of the New Yorker a while back: "Good luck guys!"). Still, now that that a dose of realism has been introduced into the Iraq project, with Rummy no longer given free rein to blunder about, real progress is slowly being made in Iraq. Not to mention the region at large. No, I am not one of those who believe that Lebanon is on an inexorable democratic course, or that Egyptian democratization is racing ahead all A-OK, or that the House of Saud has discovered how cool and groovy democracy is. Lebanon could plunge back into civil war in the years ahead, Egypt, even were it to become increasingly democratic, could fall under greater Islamist sway, Saudi Arabia's future remains highly problematic. But, again, slow progress on all these fronts is being made. And Bush's intervention in Iraq is a very important reason why (not to mention that we continue to avoid a repeat attack on the American homeland, a major and under-appreciated accomplishment, despite the embarrasment that UBL remains at large).

Bush's Major Shortcomings

Despite this, however, I have become increasingly dismayed by this Administration's tone-deafness, bunker mentality, mediocrity, vindictiveness, and other short-comings. There have been many 'the Emperor has no clothes' moments of late. The federal response to Katrina, beyond the massive incompetence of the local and state authorities, was an international embarrasment. Not least for the cronyism displayed by the 'heck of a job Brownie' absurdities. And, to add insult to injury, Bush followed this up with Harriet Miers! A decent, kind and smart woman, to be sure, but prima facie not Supreme Court timber. The fact that she had been Bush's lawyer reinforced the sense of a reckless simpleton provincializing our highest institutions so as to be comforted by the company of intimates and to award loyal retainers. This was painfully unserious and unprofessional. George Will put it very well here:

Miers's advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

Indeed. Will well summarizes why so many us were so profoundly disturbed by Bush's pick. How could this come to pass? Was it because Rove was busy staving off Fitz, Libby was imploding causing Cheney to be distracted, an ineffective Andy Card was not seized of the train wreck careening towards the White House (high time for a Howard Baker, by the way, to replace Card)? Who was really manning the ship of state, one anxiously wondered? Still, perhaps Bill Kristol is right and Bush has bottomed out. In Miers' disastrous crash and burn lies an opportunity (Luttig! McConnell!). And, of course, it should be mentioned that Bush has made good picks like John Roberts and Ben Bernanke, so the record is not by any stretch universally bad. Still, that he would have pushed Miers for SCOTUS was profoundly disturbing to many, and for good reason.

That Character Thing

So let's assume the very best, and hope last week was a Bush-bottoming of sorts (by no means a forgone conclusion). Alas, there is still a nettlesome issue of character. After all, Bush came into office promising a return to the highest standards of ethics in government. Clinton had dishonored the office, not only because of his dubious legalistic maneuverings surrounding Monica, but also because he had twice allowed genocidal outrages on his watch (Rwanda, Bosnia). But the stock market had done swimmingly, and IPOs were all the rage! After 9/11, Andrew Sullivan had pointed us to this wonderful W.H. Auden poem that seemed to sum up the emptiness of the Clinton years as the 9/11 zietgeist took hold:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

We had high hopes coming out of the immense trauma of 9/11. The country was united, and comprehended readily the peril she was faced with. A sense of moral strength and fortitude and national purpose seemed in the air. Perhaps the cheap Vegas-ification and Hilton-ization of the country would slow--as well as the endless gab-fests about flipping real estate and NASDAQ stocks. Now, almost half a decade on, we are disabused of such homilies. Instead, we see encroachments of Clintonian parsing and technicalities infecting the Bush Administration--most notably with regard to the Plame/Libby scandal. In September of 2003 White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "f anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." By the very next day, Bush decided to inject a legal standard, however: "And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." Fast forward to July 18th 2005. Bush again: "f someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration". So now a showing of commission of a crime was necessitated. I ask you: how likely is it that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were not at all involved in the leak? This is why Bush had to walk away from McCellan's original statement. Yes, perhaps Libby's alleged perjury prevents a showing of legal violations by others. But this is not exactly a showcase of high ethics and honorable behavior by the White House.

Look, any reader of this blog knows that I think very little of Joe Wilson. But I must say, it is a testament to the insecurity of this Administration and their vindictiveness and win at all costs mentality that they would have created a mini-Valerie Plame war-room in the Office of the Vice President--with someone of Libby's import ringing up journalists to impugn his credibility via his wife. Attack Wilson full on the merits, by all means, as his credibility was always rather low. But don't compromise his wife, a covert CIA employee, even if the damage wouldn't be anywhere near Ames or Pollard-like in scope. The rule of law matters, outing CIA agents matters, honor and honesty and fair play and integrity matter. We now have the first indictment of a senior White House official since the Ulysses Grant era. How sad, especially as it wasn't nearly worth it. I mean, none of this Plame fingering was really needed, finally (the biological and chemical WMD fears were always more compelling than the nuclear angle to begin with, and in a post 9/11 climate, were more than adequate to make the case for war.).

Constructive Suggestions?

More on all this soon, but tonight I want to end on a constructive note, as I know these are difficult times for the President. So a few quick words of advice for the President, just five suggestions really.

1) Newsweek reports you watched the first 20 minutes of Fitzerald announcing the Libby indictment on television. Do this kind of thing more often. Watch the cable shows. Read some of the papers. Yes, even Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd (you can skip Krugman). Get a sense of the national mood and dialogue a little bit more. Put differently, get out of your cocoon some. There is certainly not an out and out sense of devastation through the polity, but more and more people are concerned about the broad direction the country is heading. Try to better understand why.

2) Let people in the White House, including junior staffers, occasionally drop by and pay you a visit in impromptu fashion when your schedule allows. Ask them for their take on various policy issues where you often only get advice from the same, senior staffers. And let it be known you are willing to hear the bad news with the good--and that you appreciate out of the box thinking.

3) Consider appointing a new Chief of Staff at the White House. Even if you are happy with Andy Card, new blood might not hurt. Previous Presidents go through many Chiefs of Staff for a reason. The job is exhausting and high pressure. He might even welcome the break. If you decided to replace him, look for someone in the Howard Baker mold.

4) Reach out beyond Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for advice. There are a lot of other smart people out there Mr. President. There are pillars of the New York establishment, like Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chief (and former Goldman Sachs head) John Whitehead. There are former Secretaries of Defense like Mel Laird, Frank Carlucci and Cap Weinberger. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, James Baker III, George Schultz. Cross the aisle and get feedback from the Sam Nunn's, Dick Holbrooke's and Zbig Brezinski's. Widen your net some. And yes, Brent Scowcroft, your father's best friend, deserves some one on one time with you too.

5) Signal you are not bull-headed and overly stubborn. How? Well, change course on some policy positions once in a while. For instance, support the McCain Amendment on acceptable standards for the treatment of detainees (this will also serve to signal your independence from your weakened Vice President). In similar vein, you have of late been better explaining the stakes at play in Iraq as an epochal struggle against a new form of fascistic ideology. Recall, when America faced down the Soviets in the Cold War, we also marshalled all the assets of our so-called 'soft' power-ie, propaganda tools, USAID cultural centers in far-flung capitals spreading our values, Voice of America beaming our message to eager listeners beyond the Iron Curtain. Yet, it must be said, we seem to have not taken this aspect of the struggle against radical Islam as seriously as during the struggle against Communism. For example, your point person on this matter, Karen Hughes, waited to handle family matters for many months before assuming her position. What signal does this send about how importantly we view our public diplomacy efforts? And how effective, really, are so called 'listening tours' in Jakarta or Cairo? They can't hurt, but big, bold strokes would go much further. For instance, consider announcing Guantanamo will be closed going forward. No, perhaps not tomorrow, or even next year--but after all the detainees have either been sent to home countries for detention wherever possible, or have been tried by authorized tribunals. Indefinite detention for years, without even any charges being pressed, is simply not in keeping with bedrock American values. Yes, even for the most dangerous and rotten scum on the face of the earth like some currently held at Gitmo.

There are myriad other issues and policy decisions to be made, of course. The point here is to be able to say, 'hey, I made a mistake.' 'I can change course.' You've done it on Iraq war strategy. Let's roll out the learning curve into other areas too. Part of this will come from getting advice from a wider circle. More soon, but this is just to throw a few ideas out there and get a discussion going. You're around for another 39 or so months, presumably, so let's try to make a better go of it, no?


Posted by Gregory at October 31, 2005 01:24 AM