GLOBAL VIEW
Father Knows Best?
Four failures of Bush 41's foreign policy.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, November 19, 2006 12:01 a.m.
As president of Texas A&M University, Bob Gates abolished admissions preferences for the children and grandchildren of alumni, reportedly saying it was "unworthy of a great university." Funny, then, that he should be returning to Washington on the strength of his reputation as daddy's boy.
"Daddy," of course, is former President George H. W. Bush, for whom Mr. Gates served as deputy national security adviser and director of Central Intelligence. Today, the elder Mr. Bush is being celebrated as a foreign-policy sage whose adroit stewardship of the world stands in flattering contrast with current management. Mr. Gates, along with Bush 41 hands James Baker and Larry Eagleburger of the Iraq Study Group, are now supposed to play the part of the posse come to the rescue of the wayward son. Newsweek even commissioned a poll that found that "67% favor Bush Senior's internationalist approach to foreign policy over his son's more unilateral course."
Curiously, a similar percentage of Americans voted for someone other than Mr. Bush during his 1992 re-election bid. So it's worth reprising just what his "internationalist approach" achieved, and where it failed. The senior Mr. Bush is justly remembered as the architect of the broad coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait--and of the Coalition of One that took down Manuel Noriega of Panama. Bush 41 also deserves great credit for engineering the North American Free Trade Agreement and supporting German reunification when it was opposed by the likes of Margaret Thatcher.
But consider four other shorthands for the Bush 41 record. One is "1-202-456-1414," the number for the White House switchboard. As secretary of state, Mr. Baker read it aloud in congressional testimony in 1990, ostensibly for the benefit of Israelis once they got "serious about peace." A year later, and for much the same reason, the Bush administration threatened to withhold $10 billion in commercial loan guarantees, which Israel needed to cope with the influx of some one million Russian Jews--fully a fifth of its population.
For its efforts, the Bush administration brought Arabs and Israelis together for the Madrid Peace Conference, which set the groundwork for the Oslo Accords. These were touted as historic achievements, but for Israel it meant more terrorism, culminating in the second intifada, and for the Palestinians it meant repression in the person of Yasser Arafat and mass radicalization in the movement of Hamas. Worse, Mr. Baker fostered the fatal perception that the failure of Arabs and Jews to make peace was the root of the region's problems, not a symptom of them, and that the obstacle to peace was intransigent Israel, not militant Islam. Bob Gates later gave voice to that perception when he wrote, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, that the road to Mideast peace must "not kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's obstructionism."
Or take "Lawrence of Serbia," the moniker Mr. Eagleburger earned for his initial indulgence, as the State Department's point man on Yugoslav affairs during the early 1990s while the country was coming apart, of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. Mr. Eagleburger, who had longstanding business ties in Belgrade, spent the early period of the war largely ignoring Mr. Milosevic's depredations on his neighbors, including paramilitary slaughters in Vukovar and concentration camps in Omarska. "There was a kind of preference for stability and an attachment to the old Yugoslavia over our interests in human rights," Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute told Newsday in 1992, adding the administration had "been standing by, waiting while the final solution is played out."
Which brings us to "Chicken Kiev," Mr. Bush's spectacularly misconceived August 1991 speech in what was shortly to become the capital of independent Ukraine. Mr. Bush's reluctance to acknowledge--and better manage--the breakup of Yugoslavia was partly a function of his reluctance to acknowledge the impending breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall from grace of his friend Mikhail Gorbachev. The U.S. was the 39th country to re-establish diplomatic ties with Lithuania, after Iceland and Mongolia had already paved the way. Once Mr. Gorbachev was gone, Mr. Bush was equally reluctant to help the new Russia get on its feet, prompting Richard Nixon to complain about the administration's "pathetically inadequate response in light of the opportunities we face in the crisis in the former Soviet Union."
But surely no Bush 41 failure was as great--or as consequential--as his apparently flip suggestion, following "victory" in the Gulf War, that the "Iraqi people . . . take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step down." Tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds took him seriously, and tens of thousands paid with their lives as Saddam quelled the revolt while the Bush administration stood by, lest it exceed its U.N. mandate.
None of this is to say that Mr. Gates is merely an avatar of Bush the Father, much as his nomination is being played that way in the media, or that he hasn't learned from past mistakes. But critics of the current administration and the "disaster" visited on Iraq by neoconservative ideologues might usefully reflect on the previous disasters visited by the non-ideologues on Iraqis, Croats and Bosnians, among others sacrificed in the name of prudence. A decade from now, they just might find themselves ruing the day Bush 43 abandoned his idealism--and the people that idealism has liberated or inspired--in the service of "realism," suffused by panic.
Just that Iran not having influence over Syria is nuts. Just like Syria hasn't a thing to do with Hezbollah and trying to topple the Lebanon government.
