The exaggerated pendulum shift in the Bush foreign policy team
Tuesday, February 7, 2006 at 5:03PM ARTICLE: “As ‘Neocons’ Leave, Bush Foreign Policy Takes Softer Line: Ms. Rice Changes Approach To Iran and North Korea; Democracy Still Key Goal; Cheney’s Waning Influence?” by Jay Solomon and Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 6 February 2006, p. A1.
All this article really says is that we ended up with the Kerry foreign policy without Kerry and the Democrats. The neocons created an overhang of serious length by invading Iraq with little-to-no desire or interest in executing the second-half effort with the vigor necessary to win the peace.
The great “shift” is nothing more than the operational/rotational tie-down created by Iraq. This denies the second Bush administration of many of the options favored by the neocons, who saw the writing on the wall and left the scene.
And thus the “neo-realists” led by Rice “rise” to the top by default. True, Rice is a better bureaucratic fighter than Powell was, but his standard was so low that anybody in that job would have scored higher simply by engaging in something other than full-time ass covering.
If a truly new foreign policy mindset was at work in the Bush administration, the neocon view of the world wouldn’t still be driving the budget/QDR process in the Pentagon, and we’d see that Pentagon back in the business of supporting diplomacy rather than diplomacy simply hiding our current military inadequacies.
Reader Comments (5)
On a construction job site, explosives aren't constantly in use. You fire up a charge, clear away the rubble/debris, and then evaluate if you need anything further in the way of explosives before you start prepping the next charge. We've had a big bang. I don't see why the geopolitical explosive cycle should be any different.
Why are you fingering the Neos? Ultimately, it's the President who is responsible for the personnell decisions of his administration, and his 2d term team are a pack of 2d raters. If you are going to finger someone as not having the appetitie to make good on the vision of the Neos, it's GW himself who should be fingered.
Recall the policy of phases, supposedly, we were going to take down our enemies one by one, forming coalitions of the willing if we could, going it alone if we had to. Hell, we barely, barely, and only then after a disastrous trip to the UN, got on to phase 2.
If you want to pinpoint where the policy has gone astray, if it has gone astray, it isn't how we have handled Iraq post take down, it was when we went to the UN. That gap of a year and a half, between entering Kabul, and rolling into Baghdad, was enormously injurious to our national will to engage the enemy, and destroy him.
Had we a President with the rhetorical flair of a Churchill, that loss of time and will could have been made up with stirring speeches delivered to the nation, but GW simply doesn't have that in him. He has grit, and he has some decent features, but he seems to be backing down from a strategy of unleashing the storm of destabilization in the mideast, which is a damn shame, for that's the only policy with a prayer at success.
If we're lucky, we'll emerge from this with a minor clash of civilizations on our hands, but if the worst comes to the worst, then we could easily be looking at a battle of extermination.
There seems to be this idea afloat, that if only we put sufficient forces on the ground in Iraq following our conquest, or if only we had poured sufficient money into the rebuilding efforts, or if only we had allowed the State Department to be the lead on reconstruction, of if only this, of if only that, we wouldn't be in the midst of a mild insurgency, or in the midst of a quasi-colonial war.
That's all nonsense. We moved in strength into a region of terror, and those that think that terror wasn't going to be what we experienced in Iraq are clueless. It's like wandering into a casino, and being surprised to find gamblig going on. DUH........
ONCE OUR POLICY WAS ONE OF seeking to destabilize Iran, instead of doing the manly thing, the traditional thing, the tried and tested thing, of armoured columns moving in strength on the enemy capital in question, WE WERE ALWAYS going to find ourselves in a terror campaign. Because it was in the best interest of the mullahs to bleed us, whether it had been Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, anywhere in the mideast, they were going to find a way to bleed us, so long as we allowed them the opportunity to do so. Because by bleeding us in a proxy campaign, they were blunting whatever desire we might have had to actually move in strength on them.
The dirballs in Tehran have somewhat succeeded in that policy objective. Instead of a cry from the nation of "On to Tehran...!" We get the sad pusillanimousness of a Murtha. Every time such a creature as Murtha opens his mouth, he warms the hearts of the mullahs in Tehran, and convinces them that their policy of bleeding us in Iraq, directly, and through the use of their chief stooge in the region, Syria, that their policy is gaining traction.
IRAN IS THE LOCUS of the problem, so long as we allowed them to exist, we were always going to be experiencing a quasi insurgency. Had nothing to do with the efforts of our reconstruction project, nor does it really have anything to do with how well, or how poorly, Rumsfeld may have handled the situation in Iraq.
I think you are too mesmerized by your wonderful theory of the follow up Sysadmin force.
That force wasn't going to be able to do spit about the determination of the mullahs in Tehran to bleed us.
So what should we do?
We had better stop deluding ourselves that the Iranian revolution is right around the corner. I don't know about you, but ever since the Mullahs took over in 1979, I've been hearing about the revolution, the uprising, the youth demographic, and nothing genuine has ever happened. And there is a reason for that, the Mullahs are killers, hell, they enjoy killing off their religious opposition, they enjoy killing anybody, for just about any reason. So expecting the unarmed to go out on the street and take on killers is a bit of a stretch. Not to mention the underlying moral problems of the policy. There is something immoral in a policy of us expecting the Iranian people to go out there and take on a well armed murderous regime, with the will and the zeal to kill them in droves, knowing that the streets will be strewn with the blood, brains and ligature of the opponents of the regime, when all the while, we have a military ready for the task at hand, genuine regime change.
The Iranian people are not going to do our dirty work for us, notwithstanding Michael Ledeen and his "faster please", {which is kind of effeminate, don't ya think...}.
Are we in a war, or are we desperately trying to manage something that can't be managed.
I see the problem as ostensibly well-educated, overly degreed Ivy League types, trying to understand and grapple with creatures but a stones throw removed from the stone age. And they haven't a clue. We're in a squalid, sordid knife fight, and their conflict resolution models have left them poorly equipped to deal with the situation. They're post-moderns, and it all wasn't supposed to go down this way. They are better equipped for smoozing at Davos, THAT, they can handle, making a move on some HOT Eurobabe, count them in, dealing with some raving lunatic from the Mideast, please.........
wow, Dan. that's a long comment, one that's not going to play very far over here. Tom and his fans (the main denizens of this weblog, obviously) are not as hawkish as you. plus, Tom's one of those Ivy League-types you're inveighing against. your view seems more like that of Robert Kaplan, which Tom has often criticized.
Dan, that is an excellent analysis.
The lone thing I would add is the following paraphrased statement made in a live Fox News interview by Yossef Bodansky, a couple days after 9/11.
We must not shy away from connecting all the dots, to all sponsoring states. Start with Taliban, Hammas and other rogue orgs and work up the chain. At each juncture, tell those still further up the chain, essentially, "we know who you are, you are next on the list." This goes even beyond the "one by one" idea and could involve major nation states. Risky? Yes. But from the standpoint of psychology, this is really the only truly effective response. The outcome would be, those in the chain either will reform or we'll go to war against them. Not much more to write.
Dan's longish comment is quite inspirational, except...
The two countries we have taken down were both wildly less connected politically and (more importantly) economically than Iran, neither have been fully pacified, and show no signs of becoming so in the next year or so.
A full-on glorious chest beating armored drive into Tehran is great for the American libido, but the ensuing multiple decades of bad blood between us and both China and India (if not outright war) might tend to diminish the glow of victory somewhat. Might also tend to diminish all those nifty low-cost goodies and financing we've grown so accustomed to.
I guess we could just bomb them too.
Screw the future! On to Beijing!